* 21 entries including; Kamala Harris (series); gold hydrogen (series); bumbling Trump campaign | phone locator | hay fever | mini-keyboard; early warning for school shootings; nut stalks Trump | Trump sinks | exploding pagers & ammo dumps; green shipping corridors; Trump-Kamala debate | my Google Nest Hub | Ukraine V Shaheds; microbial & glucose fuel cells | Finnish sand battery; AI Scientist experiment; Trump trials | Dick Cheney for Kamala | Russian trolling op; Hycean worlds | brown dwarfs with silicate atmospheres; pandemic & antibiotic resistance; Kamala laughs off Trump | Brazil boots Musk | roofing scam.
DAYLOG MON 23 SEP 24: The House GOP decided that forcing a government shutdown would be bad for them, and passed a continuing resolution to fund the government to ... 20 December.
Why such a short interval? Looks like they want to play further games after the election, when they'll know if they're going to be in charge or not. Hard to say what they'll do either way; they don't do things that make much sense, so they're hard to predict.
* Rex Huppke of USA TODAY commented: "Donald Trump's reelection campaign seems to now be 50% incoherent babbling and 50% profoundly racist lies, a mix that begs the question: Are Trump and his running mate JD Vance actually trying to win the election?"
He followed with a fake "campaign strategy" document that started out with: "We're doing great!" -- with Trump's VP candidate JD Vance "knocking it out of the park with the crazy stuff you've been saying about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio."
"Super smart, totally fake and mega-hateful nonsense. We love it. ... He has pushed forward with this inhumane, ginned-up story, likely helping us lock down the votes of men age 40 and over who [don't get] invited to family Thanksgiving dinners."
Then the document gave a "tip of the hat" to Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders for smearing Kamala Harris because she doesn't have any biological kids. "Nailed it, Sarah! With JD Childless Cat Lady Vance leading this effort, we have been able to alienate female voters at a rate we never thought possible. ... A quick note to all the women on the Trump campaign who are listening, remember you all signed an NDA."
Trump, for his part, continues to babble gobbledygook: "Is he making sense? Does he know what he's talking about? [Voters are asking themselves these questions] with just weeks to go before an election that we will say we won even if we don't win."
Trump is running completely out of steam. On thinking back to 2016, I recall wondering: Where did all these crazy Trump supporters come from? In 2024, I wonder: Where did they all go?
DAYLOG TUE 24 SEP 24: Nebraska and Maine are the only two US states that don't have a "winner take all" electoral policy: instead of one candidate getting all the electoral votes, the votes can be split.
Trump & MAGA were trying to convert Nebraska to a "winner take all" scheme; the state legislature didn't go along. There was much commentary that this was a close shave -- but Nebraska has only 5 electoral votes. No, once again, this won't be a close election.
* Trump & his sidekick JV Dunce have been spreading vicious stories about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, leading to bomb threats and other harrassments. The Haitians have hit back, filing charges against the two.
IANAL, but it does sound like they have a case. It will be interesting to see if it makes it to court. I doubt it, but anything that makes life difficult for Trump & friends is OK with me.
DAYLOG WED 25 SEP 24: Soon-to-be ex-Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were complaining about Kamala Harris saying she wanted to get rid of the filibuster -- Manchin saying "it was the only thing that kept [the Senate] together."
History suggests it was the primary tool of GOP obstruction in the Senate. Manchin has an antique idea of "moderation" -- not realizing the Center has shifted Left, that DEI, LGBT & reproductive rights, climate-change action, sensible gun-control laws & ETC are Centrist now.
The GOP is a lost cause. Sinema, not incidentally, is harder to figure than Manchin. Lately she's been saying she's a libertarian; now it makes sense, she's just incoherent.
* I'd known that a "locate my phone" service was available for years, but never paid much attention to it. I got a new cheap phone for use around the house not long ago, and Google kept prompting me in notifications to try the locator.
I decided it might be nice to find the phone if I mislaid it, so I checked it out. All had to do was get into my phone settings and turn "Location" to ON, and then I could find the phone with a page in my Google account. I could set the phone to ringing so I could find it.
Since that phone is basically used around the house -- I don't use it to make roaming calls, it doesn't have a SIM chip -- it's unlocked all the time. I can remotely lock it by setting a password on my Google account, with the lock screen displaying my name and phone number.
It did have a provision for allowing a call to that number from the lock screen -- but since I don't have a SIM chip & the phone won't automatically link to wi-fi hookups elsewhere, that was no good. Could I really remotely lock it? It doesn't get out so much, so not such a problem.
* I get followers on Spout from petty commercial accounts all the time. I think that's good, it means Spout is catching on -- if slowly. Today I got an obvious scammer peddling financial hustles. I didn't report it. Anyone who obeys the rules can sign up to Spout. I followed the account, on the basis that I'm likely to get DMs from it. That's against the rules -- and I can report it.
DAYLOG THU 26 SEP 24: Sergei Sydorenko of UKRAINSKA PRAVDA conducted an interview with Professor Francis Fukuyama, a well-know political scientist. The interview was mostly interesting because Sydorenko kept pounding on the weakening of support for Ukraine in the USA.
Sydorenko protested too much. From his view in Ukraine, & misled by dubious polls, he does not understand that Trump is way behind & continuing to sink. There's considerable public indifference to the Ukraine War, but repetitive news does that -- and support is not flagging.
Today, Kamala Harris and Volodymyr Zelenskyy -- in the USA for the moment -- had a joint press conference, with Kamala emphasizing US support for Ukraine and blasting Trump's disgraceful proposals to end the war: "They are not proposals for peace; instead, they are proposals for surrender."
Not at all incidentally, the Kamala Campaign has been running ads blasting Trump's "disgraceful proposals" in swing states with large populations of Americans of Eastern European origin. Later in the week, Zelenskyy had a meeting with Trump, which went as well -- that is, badly -- as could have been expected.
* Regarding my adventures with phone location yesterday: it had a bit of fallout, in that Google decided to run a multi-factor verification check on me. That required sending a code to another phone with a "real" phone number, not a Google Voice number.
Not a problem, except that the "real" phone number Google had was long dead -- I think it was from when I gave up my landline phone in 2017. No worries, Google readily allowed me to change to my current "real" phone number, my phone with a SIM chip, and sent me the code.
I was relieved to find out about and fix a bug that had been sitting there for years. I could have found out about it under worse circumstances. The one phone that I have with a SIM chip is basically for ID -- I have an ultra-cheap Tello contract, costs $9 USD a month. My other phones are strictly on wi-fi.
I'm now using my Google Nest Hub smart display to make outgoing phone calls. I cannot figure out how to pick up incoming calls, however. Google searches take me in circles, as does asking the Nest Hub for help. No worries, I can pick up calls on my household phone; it's always ON during the day, and it's always at hand.
* As of late, I've been downloading cartoons and such humor from Spout and sending them out on my private email lists -- one list for everyone, a sublist where I can make fun of Trump. The significance is that Spout is starting to develop a sense of humor ... it's onward and upward.
DAYLOG FRI 27 SEP 24: Trump is railing about Google supposedly suppressing favorable news stories about him, and threatening to sue. I commented: "More of the same. Possibly worse."
* Trump likes to bash China in his campaign appearances. Kamala is barely mentioning China. Makes sense: the USA is playing a tough game of cards with China, and doesn't want to show its hand. China is not really a friend to the USA but not really an enemy either, at least not yet, which makes diplomacy touchy.
* A 61-year-old Michigan man assaulted a mail carrier who was delivering a KAMALA FOR PRESIDENT mailer. The mail carrier pepper-sprayed the man, who was taken into custody by police. What IS wrong with these people?
* I have BBC.com in my newsfeed on Spout; I get articles on domestic British news, which I generally only half-understand. Today there was an article about the body of a man found in an industrial dumpster in Dublin (yes, != Britain, lest anyone get agitated).
There's obviously a story there, but I have no idea what it is, or if I'll hear any more about it. Sounds like the saying: "They have rules against this sort of thing! They have laws against this sort of thing! They make LOW-BUDGET MOVIES about this sort of thing!"
AND SO ON: It's been a while since I had an attack of hay fever, but ragweed counts are high in NE Colorado and making my life miserable. A mask helps, but only helps. While in bed, I tried using my topsheet as a filter, then a polishing cloth, but neither worked very well; I'd get up in the morning and have to painfully cough up pollen. The interesting thing is that I honestly feel crummy, beaten-up, and sick, like having a mild case of the flu. It will go away, but not at least for a week.
Pollen counts do tend to fluctuate during the day, so things are better at some times than others. I went to bed feeling worked-over on Friday night, taking two ibuprofen to mellow out a bit. When I woke up, however, I had simultaneous "charley horses" in both ankles, which was a new (and unpleasant) experience for me. I thought the ibuprofen had something to do with that, but checking around suggests it was dehydration.
Incidentally, the term "charley horse" for a muscle spasm has been around since the 1880s, having been invented by baseball players; it seems a "charley horse" is a lame horse. Anyway, my sense of taste and appetite are both shot, so I went to the super on Sunday morning and got some oatmeal and such -- it's all I can stand to eat.
* When I try to learn a new keyboard piece for my Yamaha, I cook up my own written score for it, usually from scores on the MuseScore website. That's not anything really sophisticated to do, it's a necessity when converting an ensemble or orchestral score to a two-handed keyboard score, and users like to make changes to suit their preferences. No two scores of the same tune on MuseScore are exactly alike, and sometimes they are very different.
Anyway, I draw the scores on my PC, and that leads to a problem: if I want to try something in my score to see if it works, I have to jump back and forth between the Yamaha and the PC, which is very clumsy. So ... I bought a cheap 32-key electric keyboard, on the "Lexington" label, with half-sized keys, for about $50 USD; it runs off USB power. I just got it and have been playing with it a bit. It's designed for little kids, but it seems likely to work very well for what I need it to do.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* KAMALA HARRIS (9): The election contest was nasty. Tony West once commented: "San Francisco is the bluest of blue. All political wars there are civil wars. And so it's like a family fight. And those are often the worst."
Kamala attacked Hallinan for his managerial inefficiency, pointing to a conviction rate of a bit over 50% for serious crimes, which was 30% lower than the California state average. She said Hallinan wasn't doing enough to deal with the city's gun violence, and was too quick to take plea bargains from domestic violence offenders.
On her own side, she presented the "Tough Cop Kamala" persona, which would become her trademark -- but tried to moderate it. On one hand, she blasted Hallinan for being too soft; on the other, she pledged she wouldn't seek the death penalty. She also took a moderate approach to "three-strike" offenders. The tough anti-crime laws meant stiff mandatory sentences for those convicted of three crimes in a row, even if the third crime was trivial; Kamala said she wouldn't prosecute in such cases.
The moderate mindset had its risks: As the saying goes, people standing in the middle of the road can be hit by traffic going both ways. Her campaign advisors were nervous, but Kamala was comfortable with moderation, telling them: "No good public policy ends with an exclamation point."
One of the things thrown at Kamala was Willie Brown. He had become mayor of San Francisco in 1994, a position he would retain for eight years. There were allegations of corruption; nothing was ever proven, but Hallinan still felt Kamala was vulnerable on that score. In a debate not long before the election, Hallinan said that Brown "has an interest in having a friend in the district attorney's office."
Kamala hit back hard, saying: "I will set up a public integrity desk, dedicated to dealing with investigating and prosecuting cases involving corruption by any public official -- be it Terence Hallinan or anyone else." Hallinan was visibly taken aback. On election day -- 4 November 2003 -- Kamala won with a handy 56% of the vote, becoming the first "person of color" in the role of the San Francisco DA.
Her inauguration was on 3 January 2004, Kamala writing:
QUOTE:
My mother stood between me and Ronald George, chief justice of the California Supreme Court, who I chose to swear me in. My strongest memory is of looking at her and seeing the pure pride on her face.
The room was packed to overflowing, hundreds of people from all corners of the city. Drummers drummed. A youth choir sang. One of my pastors gave a beautiful invocation. Chinese dragon dancers roamed the aisles. The San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus serenaded us all.
END_QUOTE
This was San Francisco, after all. Along with the festivities, Kamala chatted with Jerry Brown, then the mayor of Oakland; that same day, Gavin Newsom was sworn in as San Francisco's mayor. Jerry Brown had once been governor of California, and would be again, to then be followed by Gavin Newsom. She had come up into the company of the California elite, and they were not the end of her contacts among them either.
Of course there was Willie Brown, though Kamala did everything she could to downplay the connection as old news, nothing of substance, not important. The reality, however, was that Kamala was at least acquainted with top California Democrats such as Brown, Senator Diane Feinstein, and prominent House Representative Nancy Pelosi. They all would have some effect, positive or negative, on Kamala's career -- but her interactions with them were generally private, some details occasionally leaking out, sometimes garbled when they did. All that can be said is that Kamala had acquired a network of influential backers for her political ambitions, as is always the case for any upwardly-mobile politician. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* WINGS & WEAPONS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Ghost Shark: The Huge Stealth Advantage of Autonomous Submarines" by David Szondy, 19 April 2024), robot submarines are a coming thing, with Australia now having taken delivery of the first "Ghost Shark Extra-Large Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (XL-AUV)" prototype, with three more to follow in 2025. Delivery was well ahead of schedule.
Ghost Shark was developed by Australia's Defense Department, working with Anduril Australia -- the "down-under" arm of Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, the brainchild of Oculus founder Palmer Lucky, probing the leading edge of combat robotics. Ghost Shark is described as "Mission Zero" for the government's "Advanced Strategic Capabilities Accelerator (ASCA)", which envisions the automation of Australia's armed forces.
Ghost Shark will allow the Royal Australian Navy to carry out stealthy, long-range autonomous undersea missions, with intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike capabilities. It can carry a large payload for its size, because it doesn't need life-support systems or a pressurized hull, instead encapsulating the machinery and electronics in a set of watertight modules.
ED: The Aussies are not talking about specifics of the Ghost Shark. It is boxy in appearance, with a small "sail" ("conning tower"), presumably for access and to stow extendable sensor masts. It seems to almost the size of a standard 40-foot intermodal shipping container. Strapped into a frame with connectors compatible with a shipping container, it could be easily transported -- even by air, big flying freight haulers being able to carry intermodal shipping containers.
* According to an article from TWZ.com ("Above All Else JASSM Would Give Ukraine A Steady Supply Of Cruise Missiles" by Tyler Rogoway, 3 September 2024), it appears the USA is getting ready to provide "AGM-158 Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM)" to Ukraine soon.
The baseline AGM-158A was introduced to service in 2009; it had a range of 370 kilometers (230 miles) and a 450-kilogram penetrating warhead. It was eventually followed by the "AGM-158B JASSM-ER", with range extended to 1,000 kilometers. The "AGM-158C Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM)" was introduced a few years ago, and "AGM-158D JASSM-XR", with "extreme range" of 1,800 kilometer (1,120 miles) is now being introduced. JASSM is very stealthy, not reliant on GPS, has a precision targeting seeker, and has been produced in the thousands.
There have been official statements by US officials that the F-16s going into service with Ukraine would have an "advanced stand-off weapon" with range similar to that of JASSM. The AFU-AF already uses the Anglo-French "Storm Shadow / SCALP-EG" cruise missile, launching it from Sukhoi Su-24 strike aircraft, but quantities of them are limited. JASSM, in contrast, was built in large numbers, and there are plenty of them to spare.
There are public concerns over the use of Allied long-range munitions against Russia proper, but the story on that is deliberately muddied, so it's hard to read much into it. There are concerns about dud JASSMs falling into Russian hands. The AGM-158A is not that new, but it still represents advanced stealth technology, and would see extensive use in a war with China. Were one to fall into adversary hands, they would be able to determine JASSM's weaknesses and devise countermeasures.
* As discussed in an article from THEWARZONE.com ("General Atomics' XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station Drone Breaks Cover" by Jamie Hunter, Joseph Trevithick, & Tyler Rogoway, THEWARZONE.com, 7 February 2024), General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) is now proceeding with development of the "XQ-67A" combat drone, being built as part of the US Air Force's "Off-Board Sensing Station (OBSS)" program.
General Atomics, along with Kratos, was awarded a contract for the OBSS program back in 2021, with the USAF later "down-selecting" General Atomics to build and fly a demonstrator. Details have not been announced, but images show the XQ-67A has retractable tricycle landing gear, a splayed v-tail, and a main wing with little or no sweep. It also has a top-mounted dorsal engine intake and a stealthy chine line wrapping around the fuselage. It may leverage off the GA-ASI "Gremlin" program to build a modular drone with variable payloads. The company is now working towards a new generation of drones to replace the Predator and Reaper.
[ED: In recent news, OBSS has been incorporated into the USAF's "Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA)" program. OBSS no longer exists as a separate effort.]
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GOLD HYDROGEN (5): The important question about natural hydrogen is whether it makes any sense to try to extract it. Geoffry Ellis of USGS is working to answer that question. He believes that the Earth generates massive volumes of hydrogen each year -- but what he wonders is: "How much can be trapped in the subsurface that we can actually go after? That's a much more difficult question to answer."
He and his USGS colleague Sarah Gelman started out with a simple "box" model borrowed from the oil industry. The model accounted for impermeable rock traps of different kinds, the destructive effect of microbes, and the assumption -- based on oil industry experience -- that only 10% of hydrogen accumulations might ever be tapped economically. Ellis says the model comes with a value of roughly a trillion tons of hydrogen, enough to satisfy world demand for thousands of years. Ellis worries that the hydrogen could be too dispersed to be captured economically, like the millions of tons of gold that are dissolved in the oceans at parts per trillion levels.
That concern isn't stopping the hydrogen hunters. While cooped up by one of Australia's COVID-19 lockdowns in November 2020, Luke Titus ended up reading an 1944 report with the snappy title: "Bulletin Number 22 from the Department of Mines of the Geological Survey of South Australia". The report included a survey of data from farmers who had decided to go hunting for oil, using dubious methods such as divining rods. Titus says: "It's all rather amusing."
However, Titus -- co-founder of a company called Gold Hydrogen -- stopped laughing when he saw the data from one borehole, drilled in 1921 on Kangaroo Island. It had produced as much as 80% hydrogen. Another well, on the nearby Yorke Peninsula, was close to 70%.
In February 2021, when South Australia expanded its oil regulations to allow drilling for hydrogen, Titus took the leap, quickly submitting an application to explore nearly 8000 square kilometers on the Yorke Peninsula and Kangaroo Island. He set up two other paper companies to lodge applications on thousands more square kilometers. Within weeks, he had competitors, saying: "A bunch of other businesses got wind of it."
Enthusiasm for hydrogen is now high in South Australia. The state's geology suggests there isn't a better place to find it; it's covered by the ancient Gawler Craton, and its iron and uranium mines point to the source rocks needed for both serpentinization and radiolysis. With its coastal location, rocks are sure to be water-saturated. He's conducted aerial geophysical surveys to find the best places for exploratory drills, and has been successfully raising money to drill them.
In Spain, Ian Munro is waiting on regulators to get their act together. Like Gold Hydrogen, his company Helios Aragon was founded on old but promising data: a "show" of 25% hydrogen in the Monzon-1 well, drilled in 1963 to a depth of 3.7 kilometers (2.3 miles) by the National Petroleum Company of Aragon. As with South Australia, the geology is promising. In the core of the Pyrenees are iron-rich marine rocks, squeezed and lifted when the Iberian Plate closed an ocean and rammed into France about 65 million years ago. Munro says deep faults channel hydrogen produced in those rocks up into a porous sandstone layer, which is capped by an impermeable shale. Munro wants to start drilling exploratory wells, but he's got a regulatory problem: his original lease was under Spain's oil laws, and a 2021 climate law has since put a moratorium on new operations. He won't be able to start drilling until Spain carves out an exemption for hydrogen. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* EARLY WARNING: As discussed in an article from CNN.com ("Anonymous Tips Work To Prevent School Shootings and Suicides" by Josh Campbell, 17 January 2024), a study has shown that Anonymous reporting systems used by schoolkids to report worrying behavior among their peers has resulted in the prevention of numerous instances of suicide, school violence, and planned attacks.
Researchers evaluated data from the "Say Something Anonymous Reporting System (SSARS)", run by the violence-prevention group Sandy Hook Promise. SSARS includes an around-the-clock crisis center staffed by trained counselors who review tipoffs to potential threats. Lead authors of the study were affiliated with the University of Michigan and Sandy Hook Promise.
On checking tips submitted from 2019 to 2023 in one southeastern state, the researchers found that SSARS "enabled 1,039 confirmed mental health interventions; 109 'saves' where clear evidence of imminent suicide crisis was present and averted; prevented 38 acts of school-violence including weapons recovered on school grounds; and averted 6 confirmed planned school attacks." Almost 10% of tips were related to firearms, which researchers noted "are the leading cause of death among children and adolescents," citing US Centers for Disease Control statistics.
Firearm-related tips received by SSARS included potential school shootings, observing someone in possession of a weapon, bullying, and harassment or intimidation. The authors wrote: "The urgency of firearm-related tips highlights the need to educate families on firearm violence prevention and ensure support and response protocols for school systems."
Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, who has studied school shootings for more than 20 years, previously told CNN:
QUOTE:
You have to educate the student body that this is not an effort to rat out your fellow student or get a fellow student in trouble. Educate the students and the faculty to what the red-flag behaviors are ... and make it so that students can call in on a confidential line.
END_QUOTE
A Secret Service report noted the importance of the confidentiality:
QUOTE:
Anonymous and confidential reporting options can broaden the appeal of reporting, especially for students who are concerned about being identified and ostracized by their peers after reporting. Research finds that the fear of being ostracized, or experiencing other forms of retaliation, is a significant barrier to reporting.
END_QUOTE
SSARS serves more than 5 million students in sixth through 12th grade in 23 states, according to the study. Other regions use the StopIt anonymous reporting system, or unique apps for students in a particular school district for students to report threats.
There is bipartisan support for anonymous threat reporting systems, since they aren't directly connected to gun safety legislation. Some lawmakers want them to be mandatory. Republican California state Senator Scott Wilk initiated legislation in 2023 titled the "Saugus Strong Act", a reference to the 2019 incident at Saugus High School near Los Angeles in which an armed 16-year-old killed two students and injured three others.
The bill would require state education agencies to implement systems for students, parents, and concerned community members to report threatening behavior anonymously. Wilk said: "It is way worse than anything my generation had to go through. Having this resource available to students and their families could very well mean the difference between life and death."
COMMENT ON ARTICLEDAYLOG MONDAY 16 SEP 24: Yesterday, Secret Service agents guarding Trump at his Florida golf course spotted an armed man and fired on him, chasing him off. The intruder was later captured, being one Ryan Wesley Routh. He'd spent the day lurking around the golf course, never got anywhere near close to Trump, and never fired a shot.
Routh has a long rap sheet, people who met him finding him wildly unbalanced, and had been a Trump voter -- apparently being turned off by Trump's contempt for Ukraine. Routh was a Ukraine War groupie, but AFUkraine is very familiar with such losers and steers clear of them.
There's some talk that the "attack" was staged -- but I keep saying, the Trump Gang is inept, they'd get caught trying to be tricky. Trump is a trouble magnet; I'm not surprised such things happen to him, only that they don't happen more often.
* One Philip Bump, a columnist for WAPO, wrote an article pointing out that, over time, many of the felony charges against Trump have evaporated -- Bump saying that if Trump is elected in November, he could get rid of all the rest.
That is all true, but I think overly pessimistic. Bump says the odds are even of Trump being elected -- which is taking a magical belief in the polls, when the visible reality is that the Trump campaign is running on empty, and there's little public enthusiasm for him. Kamala, in contrast, goes from strength to strength. Trump barely won in 2016, lost handily in 2020 -- like he's gonna be better off in 2024? By all evidence, he is much worse off.
Yes, the legal hassles have been frustrating -- but Judge Chutkan's trial is moving again, the Georgia trial may be stalled but it is not dead, and the classified documents case has not gone away. Judge Cannon dismissed that case on the flimsiest constitutional pretexts. Jack Smith is appealing, and the dismissal may have been good news for him. Until Judge Cannon made a decision, he couldn't appeal, he was stuck with her. Odds are good the case will be resurrected, and it may well not go back to Judge Cannon. It will be good if it doesn't, but changing courts may mean more delay.
DAYLOG TUE 17 SEP 24: Pete Buttigieg sez of Trump: "Cats! Dogs! Geese! Laura Loomer! Look, now he's attacking Taylor! Like the last season of a show that gets canceled for getting over-the-top, and at the same time, boring."
"This election is about jobs, wages, climate, health care, abortion. Not his show. Your life." The polls keep saying the election will be close; anyone watching what's going on knows it won't. MAGA is fading away and disappearing.
* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been working on a "peace plan" to end the war in Ukraine. It's not quite finished yet, but American officials who are in the loop find the plan workable.
It hasn't been released; all that's known is that it makes no territorial concessions to Russia. Even if it remains unknown, having a reasonable plan where all the Allies know what they must do will go a long way towards ending the inevitable bickering over how to fight the war.
* In startling news, thousands of Lebanese Hezbollah militants were injured when ... their pagers exploded. It seems Hezbollah turned to pagers because they were hard to track, and the Israelis passed a booby-trapped batch onto them. Sounds like a MISSION IMPOSSIBLE caper.
DAYLOG WED 18 SEP 24: With regards to the news of Lebanon's Hezbollah being badly injured by exploding pagers, that's been followed up by a second attack using exploding handheld radios. Fingers are being pointed to Israel's covert Unit 8200 as the mastermind.
In Ukraine War news, Ukrainian killer drones struck a munitions depot in Tver Oblast, a few hundred kilometers westerly of Moscow, with earthquake-class detonations. As could be expected, AFU drone attacks continue to become more ambitious. I suspect the attacks use jammer & decoy drones to let the killer drones get through. On the Kursk front, AFU officials say the Orc counter-offensive has been halted, though the AFU is well outnumbered. That speaks of effective use of terrain and superior firepower.
DAYLOG THU 19 SEP 24: It appears that the AFUkraine strike on the ammo dump in Tver Oblast set off a fireball that could be seen with the naked eye from orbit. It seems the dump was hit with about a hundred drones. I'm thinking we'll see strikes like this every week or two. At least two more Russian ammo dumps were hit later in the week, though details haven't been mentioned.
* Regarding the Hezbollah's exploding pagers and walkie-talkies: now there's public worry about everybody's smartphones and such blowing up. Nah, if they're not packed with explosives, they won't do that. Lithium batteries can swell and torch up on occasion, but it's not an explosive process. I had a cheap Chinese phone that I was using as an always-on assistant -- until it stopped working. On inspection, the battery had swelled up and broken open the case.
* Voting in North Carolina now requires ID. UNC at Chapel Hill decided it was OK for students and employees to use their UNC One Card -- an ID app -- for voting. The state GOP sued, saying they had to show physical ID, but now a state judge told them to get lost.
The State Board of Elections had approved the use of the UNC One Card, but the GOP said the law didn't allow the SBOE to do that. Actually, the law is flexible on that score -- simply specifying a "card" and not saying it had to be a printed one -- and the SBOE has approved over a dozen different ID apps. When oh when will we have national digital ID?
* There's still talk these days of voters who are "undecided". Reality: anyone who can't see any difference between Trump & Kamala will never vote for Kamala. They're just not sure if they want to vote for Trump, and pretending that Kamala is an option.
DAYLOG FRI 20 SEP 24: Blogger Jeff "Takes No Prisoners" Tiedrich had a reference to Dr. Thomas Miller, a data scientist at Northwestern University in Illinois, whose predictions of the outcomes of the 2020 election were unusually accurate.
Polls these days invite suspicion -- methodology seems off. Miller prefers to get his raw data from bookmaking sites. Myself, I've long seen the bookies as relatively trustworthy; the bookies want to get the right answer, because that's how they make money. Anyway, Miller is talking about a blowout along the lines of Clinton-Dole 1996 (379 for Clinton, 270 to win), or maybe better LBJ-Goldwater 1964 (486) -- though not Reagan-Mondale 1984 (525). Eh, over 400 is more than good enough.
It has been pointed out that both current presidential campaigns are saying it will be a tight race -- because of course they will, it's in their interests to say so. I'm suspecting that Kamala, who is missing no tricks, is feeling very confident, & Trump is feeling very unhappy.
Consider Britain's 4th of July election, where Labour tripled their seats in Commons while the Tories lost 2/3rds. The popular vote wasn't so lopsided, with Labour scoring about 50% more than the Tories, but that's still crushing. Now we wait for the USA's Guy Fawkes Day.
* Three Russian cosmonauts have now completed the longest stay ever on the International Space Station. I commented: "Possibly they were told they would be drafted if they returned to Earth."
* AND SO ON: The exploding pagers that did such injury to Hezbollah were labeled as made by Gold Apollo of Taiwan -- with Hsu Ching-Kuang, the boss of the company, now in the hot seat, saying: "This is very embarrassing." Hsu said they were actually made by a Budapest-based company called BAC Consulting. Gold Apollo had an arrangement with BAC to allow it to obtain Gold Apollo pagers, and to use the Gold Apollo logo on its own pagers.
Investigation shows BAC is run by one Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono; its most recent published balance sheet had a bottom line of only $320 USD. Hsu says financial arrangements with BAC were "strange", with Gold Apollo being paid from a Middle Eastern bank. Barsony-Arcidiacono is apparently under Hungarian police protection, and no doubt is being asked many questions.
The exploding walkie-talkies were labeled as from the Japanese company Icom. Icom says that they haven't made the model in question for ten years, and they appear to have been knock-off production with the Icom label. Both Gold Apollo and Icom deny making the booby-trapped devices, and there's no reason to doubt them: anybody with the expertise and resources could buy up the devices and booby-trap them, or fake the devices completely. It seems unlikely the trail will be traced much further.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* KAMALA HARRIS (8): The young Kamala Harris long had men in her life, but she never said much about them, and they were clearly not very important -- with one exception: Willie Brown, the Speaker of the California State Assembly. It seems they met in 1994, when Kamala was 29 and Brown was 59. He was technically married, but had been separated from his wife for a decade; they remained on familial terms, simply wanting to lead separate lives. He was known to date younger women, it seems usually somewhat younger than Kamala.
They dated for two years, with the San Francisco gossip columnists playing it up. One of them, Herb Caen, was at Brown's surprise 60th birthday party in March 1994, when Clint Eastwood "spilled champagne on the Speaker's new steady, Kamala Harris." Not much else is known about the relationship, except that Speaker Brown got her positions on two state regulatory boards: the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission.
Tales would also circulate that Brown bought her a BMW. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, maybe the real story was garbled -- but the tale is impossible to confirm and goes nowhere. In any case, it was another matter in Kamala's life that would only be an issue to people who wanted to make it one. Much later, when a belated fuss was made about Kamala's association with Brown, he wrote an essay that put the fuss into perspective, titled: "Sure, I Dated Kamala Harris. So What?"
By that time, Kamala had acquired a brother-in-law, Maya having married a Stanford Law classmate, Tony West, born in 1965. Maya and Tony had known each other while at Stanford Law, but didn't start dating until after they both graduated in 1992. Tony was from San Francisco, and had gone to Harvard before attending Stanford Law. Both would have complicated legal careers in commercial, government, and academic roles, along with close involvement with Democratic Party politics.
* Kamala liked what she was doing in the city attorney's office and spent two years in that position. However, she hadn't forgotten her wasted time in the district attorney's office and her failure to accomplish anything there. Kamala was not the sort of person who accepted defeat, recalling in any challenging situation what Shyamala had always asked her girls: "Well, what did you do?"
On consideration, it was obvious what to do: run for San Francisco DA. It was a big step to take, since she hadn't ever conducted a serious election campaign before and it was a big challenge. She was inspired by the resonant words of James Baldwin, one of her favorite authors: "There is never a time in the future when we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now."
Her opponents in the race was the incumbent, Terence Hallinan, with a reputation for leaning strongly to the Left -- a big asset in San Francisco. Another candidate, Bill Fazio, was to the Right of Kamala, but he dropped out in a run-off election, with the other two continuing the fight.
Kamala's campaign was home-grown; she cooked up her own campaign fliers, and went to Kinko's to have copies made. Shyamala was involved as well, Kamala writing:
QUOTE:
"Kamala, let's go. Come on, we're going to be late." My mother was losing patience. "Just a second, Mommy," I called back. (Yes, my mother was and always will be "Mommy" to me.) We were on our way to campaign headquarters, where volunteers were gathering. My mother often took charge of the volunteer operation, and she didn't dillydally. Everyone knew that when Shyamala spoke, you listened.
END_QUOTE
When Shyamala gave orders, people obeyed. Maya assisted, less forcefully, as well. The campaign headquarters was in Bayview, a slum section of San Francisco; Kamala wanted to focus on the "underserved" parts of the city. It wasn't the kind of neighborhood most San Franciscans went out of their way to visit, but Kamala had no shortage of volunteers, of all backgrounds, showing up there. She would set up in front of, say, a supermarket, accosting people with: "Hi! I'm Kamala Harris. I'm running for district attorney, and I hope to have your support." As assertive as she always was, being that forward took some getting used to. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* Flights in August included:
[04 AUG 24] USA CC / FALCON 9 / CYGNUS 21 (NG 21) -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Cape Canaveral at 1502 UTC (local time + 4) to put the 21st operational "Cygnus" supply capsule, designated "NG 21", into space on an International Space Station support mission. The Falcon 9 main stage soft-landed back in Florida. The capsule docked with the ISS two days later.
The capsule was named the SS Francis R. "Dick" Scobee, in honor of the fallen commander of the ill-fated Challenger STS-51-L mission. It carried about 3,843 kilograms (8,472 pounds) of cargo to the orbiting outpost. This cargo included scientific experiments, such as tests of water recovery technologies, a process to produce blood and immune cells in microgravity, and a demonstration of centripetal force for STEM engagement. It also carried an iROSA solar array upgrade kit, the eighth such kit needed for the installation of the final set of upgraded arrays, as well as spare water tanks and pump assemblies for station maintenance.
[06 AUG 24] CN TY / LONG MARCH 6A / G60 x 18 -- A Chinese Chang Zheng (Long March) 6A booster was launched from Taiyuan at 0642 UTC (local time - 8) to put 18 "G60" low-orbit comsats into space into an 800-kilometer (500-mile) orbit.
The G60 system is the Chinese equivalent of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, with the initial system to consist of 1,296 satellites. Ultimately, the constellation will consist of more than 14,000 low-orbit broadband multimedia satellites. Chinese entity Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST) is building the system.
Shanghai Gesi Aerospace Technology (Genesat) managed the construction of the G60 satellites. SSST formed Genesat in collaboration with the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IAMCAS). The G60 satellites are being built at a factory in Shanghai's Songjiang District using a fully automated production line that aims to produce up to 500 units per year by the end of 2025.
G60's competitors include a similar low-orbit constellation known as Guowang (SatNet) and a medium-Earth orbit constellation called Smart Skynet. Additionally, Chinese company Landspace recently applied for clearance for a 10,000 satellite constellation. The G60 launch will help to secure orbits and frequencies for China as demand in this competitive sector increases, both globally and nationally.
Long March 6A is a two stage booster with four solid rocket motors strapped to the rocket's first stage. Unlike Falcon 9, which SpaceX uses to launch its Starlink constellation, the Long March 6A is not reusable, although suitable reusable boosters are being built and tested in China. This was the fourth launch of the Long March 6 rocket this year.
[15 AUG 24] USA VB / FALCON 9 / TRANSPORTER 11 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 booster was launched from Vandenberg SFB at 1856 UTC (local time - 7) on the "Transporter 11" mission, to put 116 payloads into orbit. Most of the payloads were deployed directly from the upper stage, but D-Orbit's ION space tug deployed five more satellites. Notable among the payloads were a number of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote-sensing satellites:
Other larger payloads included:
CubeSat payloads included:
The rest of the payloads were not described, including "GNA-3" (possibly Swedish), "SATORO T2" (possibly Taiwanese), plus "UM5 EOSAT" and "UM5SAT", apparently from Morocco's Mohammed V University in Rabat (UM5R).
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GOLD HYDROGEN (4): Where, exactly, is natural hydrogen coming from? The main process of production is now believed to be a set of high-temperature reactions between water and iron-rich minerals such as olivine, which dominate Earth's mantle. One common reaction is called "serpentinization", because it converts olivine into another kind of mineral called serpentinite. In the process, the iron oxidizes, grabbing oxygen atoms from water molecules and releasing hydrogen.
Scientists diving in submersibles have seen this process up close at the volcanic Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where tectonic plates are pulled apart and mantle rocks rise up to generate fresh slabs of ocean crust. At a site known as "Lost City" -- for the tall "white smoker" chimneys gushing mineral-rich hot water -- researchers found high amounts of hydrogen spewing from the sea floor. And on Iceland, which straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Isabella Moretti and her colleagues have recorded comparable hydrogen flows at some of the hot springs and geothermal wells that dot the country.
Of course, it would be best to find natural hydrogen in deposits closer to potential users. Owain Jackson -- exploration director at H2Au, a UK-based hydrogen company -- says prospectors are looking in cratons, the ancient cores of continents.
Buried in the cratons are bands of iron-rich rock, known as "greenstone belts" -- the remnants of ocean crust that were squeezed between the cratons in ancient continental collisions. Where olivine and other minerals are buried deep enough to be hotter than 200 degrees Celsius (390 degrees Fahrenheit) but still exposed to water percolating from the surface, they can produce hydrogen. Jackson, who once explore for natural hydrogen in a region of Mali a few hundred kilometers away from Bourakebougou, believes greenstone belts deep in the West African craton are driving the hydrogen production there.
Alain Prinzhofer says that cratons hold a second major source of iron with hydrogen-producing potential, linked to an evolutionary turning point about 2.4 billion years ago. At the time, the oceans were anoxic and saturated in dissolved iron -- but then ocean-living microbes evolved the ability to photosynthesize, releasing oxygen in the process. The "Great Oxidation Event" caused the iron to fall as rust to the ocean floor, where it eventually turned to stone. Like greenstone belts, some of these deposits ended up embedded surviving in the cratons, to be known today as "banded iron formations". They're believed to hold some 60% of the world's iron reserves.
In a 2014 paper, Barbara Sherwood Lollar and her colleagues evaluated the makeup of Earth's cratons and found that serpentinization should produce as much as 80% of Earth's hydrogen. A second mechanism, "radiolysis", may generate the rest. As radioactive elements in the crust such as uranium and thorium decay, they emit beta particles -- helium nuclei -- along with other radiation that can split water molecules underground to also produce some hydrogen.
Viacheslav Zgonnik advocates a more exotic mechanism, suspecting that primordial hydrogen, trapped soon after the planet's birth in its iron core, is seeping to the surface through thousands of kilometers of rock. Zgonnik admits the idea is speculative and a long shot. Prinzhofer shrugs about the question of the origins of natural hydrogen, saying it's not really important: "Maybe we are all completely wrong. It doesn't matter for the industry." The oil industry sprang up long before anyone knew where oil came from. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GREEN SHIPPING CORRIDORS: As discussed in an article from BBC.com "Green Shipping Corridors Gaining Momentum" by Jorn Madslien, 17 December 2023), Rotterdam in the Netherlands has long been a major shipping port. The port authority there is now trying to adapt to the 21st century, working with its opposite number in Singapore to develop a "green shipping corridor (GSC)".
Shipping is a major contributor to greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions, and the emissions from marine diesels are notoriously dirty. The objective of the GSC is to ensure that ships moving along the route use zero- or low-emission fuels. Accordingly, Rotterdam and Singapore are building new storage facilities for green fuels, particularly ammonia and methanol, as alternatives to fuel oil. The Port of Rotterdam's interim chief executive, Boudewijn Siemons, says that Rotterdam and Singapore are trying to show the concept will work:
QUOTE:
It's a pragmatic approach to carbon reduction in shipping. We have to get started somewhere, and you cannot get started by implementing zero emission shipping as a total solution everywhere in the world. That's why we're seeking these green corridors as proof points on a limited scale. We then have to scale up from there.
END_QUOTE
In September, the first voyage of a "green" container ship through the corridor took place, with the LAURA MAERSK powered by methanol. Methanol propulsion can cut emissions by almost two-thirds relative to diesel.
The GSC concept was born at COP26, the global environment summit held in Glasgow, Scotland in 2021. Under the "Clydebank Declaration", 22 22 countries including the UK made a commitment to create at least six corridors by the middle of this decade. The COP28 meeting in the UAE in 2023 saw the announcement of new corridors, including one from Canada's west coast to Korea and Japan, one in the Caribbean, and another between Houston in the US and Antwerp in Belgium. The International Maritime Organization (IMO), which represents the shipping industry, has also pledged that the sector will achieve net-zero emissions "by or around" 2050.
Of course, building ports for zero-emissions shipping implies building ships with zero emissions, and that's a challenge for ship-makers. Industry figures show that just 0.6% of cargo ships around the world run on alternative fuels, and only 15 to 16% of vessels currently on order will run on dual or alternative fuels. However, there is a push for more green shipping, notably from online shopping giant Amazon. The firm, a founding member of the Zero-Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance, along with other companies such as furniture group Ikea and clothing firm Patagonia, recently renewed a reduced emissions contract with shipping giant Maersk.
In the meantime, cargo firm North Sea Container Line is launching a ship powered by ammonia, which will operate between Norway and Germany. Similarly Hoegh Autoliners, which specializes in transporting cars and trains, is building twelve new ammonia-propelled ships.
Lynn Loo -- the chief executive of the Global Center for Maritime Decarbonization, a "green" advocacy organization, forecasts that ammonia production could double or even triple by 2050. She says there needs to be "a dramatic rise in the number of vessels capable of transporting ammonia from the 200 that are on the water today" -- and there needs to be "significant infrastructure buildout to support the much higher throughput of ammonia in the future". Edward Glossop -- head of sustainable operations at Bunker Holding, the world's largest supplier of marine fuels -- comments:
QUOTE:
None of these are going to be easy to scale. But ammonia may be the least challenging. The first ammonia engines will be delivered to shipyards by the end of 2024, and we aim to be a commercial supplier of low emission ammonia within the next few years.
END_QUOTE
Ammonia does have a leg up in that there is already a port and shipping infrastructure that handles it, though it has to be scaled up considerably. Some industry observers believe that alternative fuels will be expensive and so unpopular, with the push towards conversion to them across the board leading to a supply bottleneck. Siemons acknowledges that the process of decarbonizing shipping ...
QUOTE:
... is both complex and expensive -- but we should not predict the future based on the state of the technologies today, and on the state of the markets today. Yes, today fuel oil is cheaper than hydrogen or ammonia, but that doesn't mean it has to be so in the future.
END_QUOTE
Siemons concludes: "It all has to become renewable."
COMMENT ON ARTICLEDAYLOG MON 09 SEP 24: It looks like the House MAGA are trying to game another government spending authorization. Since few people like government shut-downs and the like, I suspect they will back down, but we'll see. Not a great idea just before elections.
* Concerning Judge Juan Merchan's decision to put off Trump's sentencing until after the election: although there was some complaint, there wasn't the usual outrage, at least not on Spout. People are figuring out: That's how the Law works & we have to deal with it.
* Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has now publicly announced that Ukraine is building underground munitions factories. They were obviously doing so, since everything in Ukraine is vulnerable to Russian missiles, but it was interesting to obtain confirmation. It seems many of the factories are being built in cooperation with Allied defense firms. Manufacturers don't want to build new factories at home that may be idle after the emergency is over; it makes sense to build in Ukraine instead.
News from the war is limited these days, but there's been talk of drones carrying "thermite" charges -- thermite being a mix of powered aluminum & rust that burns very hot and doesn't need oxygen. Thermite doesn't blow things up, but it's good for burning them down. It appears the Russians have copied the idea.
DAYLOG TUE 10 SEP 24: As mentioned yesterday, the House MAGA are talking about a government shutdown over funding, or something silly like that. Today Trump encouraged them to shut down the government -- with House GOP from swing states protesting loudly.
I find it unlikely that the House MAGA can get the votes for a shutdown. Alas, they've shown in the past that they can still bring the House to a dead stop. It's ridiculous: if House GOP have safe seats, the shutdown won't make them safer -- if they don't have safe seats, it will make them less safe. Shutdowns have never done them any good, but they are slow learners.
* Melania Trump is playing the paranoid card and saying there's more to the assassination attempt on her husband than the FBI is admitting. Oh sit DOWN, woman! Melania's hysteria will go nowhere, any more than will that of the Uncompromising Left who insist it was staged.
Trump and Kamala debate tonight. I'm expecting Kamala will do well and Trump will do poorly, but it won't matter, it won't move the needle on the election. That's already decided.
* I was poking around on Amazon and found ... credit card-sized Android smartphones. They were obviously made in China, with prices ranging from $50 to $200 USD. They were cute, but they screamed JUNK, and I had no use for one. I did get a cheap Samsung phone for carrying around the house -- I'm getting old, my memory's not so good, and it has tools to help. I have an older phone I have configured to make phone calls, but I decided it might be useful to have the new phone make calls, too.
I have a Google Voice number that I use normally, plus a regular phone number for the "other" smartphone, which has a SIM chip. I tried to make calls out on the new phone using the Google Voice number, but they went nowhere. I vaguely recalled I had to establish a setting someplace. The new phone, on checking, did have the Google Voice number established -- and then I finally found out I hadn't enabled wi-fi for phone calls, enabled it, and all was good.
In somewhat connected news, AFUkraine is using Steam Deck handheld game boxes to direct remote-control machine-gun turrets. I have a Steam Deck, it has processing power, nice display, plenty of game controls, it would do the job. It does run hot, so I turned down the GPU.
DAYLOG WED 11 SEP 24: The Trump-Kamala debate was last night. I didn't watch, but the judgement was that Trump got shut down bigtime. I caught the highlights the next day. It was as I expected -- I wasn't disappointed, but once more, the election is already decided.
More interesting was the public feedback, MAGA complaining that Kamala was so nasty to poor little Trump. On the other side of the aisle, Stephen Colbert played up the win -- but could not resist taking cheap shots at Joe Biden while he was at it. I'm not forgiving Colbert now.
* Three Libertarian candidates got thrown off the ballot in Iowa on technical issues -- thanks to Republican efforts, the GOP realizing they would skim off their votes. Libertarians deny that they're extreme Right, but the GOP knows it perfectly well.
* Such a day today. Got some (expensive) dental work done this morning, then went and got flu / covid vaccinations, and bought kit for a house-painting project.
I inherited two IRAs from my late honored father after he passed in 2014, and I have to get a required minimum distribution from them every year. One was with an outfit named DA Davidson; I called them up, talked to them a bit, got the money in my bank account a few days later.
The other IRA is with ... Wells Fargo. I called them up last week, they cut out the RMD from the account, saying I should log in later and transfer the money. I get in this week and find out I have to fill out a PDF to do the transfer. It asked for a written signature. Did I need to download the PDF, print it out, scan it, then upload it again? I thought not, but WF rejected the form. I had a digital image of my signature; I found an online PDF editor named "SmallPDF", plugged in the signature, and uploaded.
I'll see if this works. Not only was nothing set up for convenience, but the WF secure messaging system does not keep a log of message transfers -- so I had to upload twice to make sure it went through. I am annoyed. Vaccine reaction might be aggravating it.
DAYLOG THU 12 SEP 24: With regards to Trump's drubbing in the presidential debate, a TikToker came up with a video in which he quoted Trump's comments, some of which were perfectly mad, using voices of characters from THE SIMPSONS. The TikToker was a very good voice actor. I replied to the posting of the video with a gif of two little dogs with party hats eating cake, with the caption: MORE PLEASE. Not incidentally, Trump says he won't do another debate. NO MAS!
One of the issues that came up in the debate was, of course, gun safety. Kamala says she will push for sensible gun safety laws. Both Kamala and Tim Walz are gun owners, BTW; Kamala used to pack one when she was a prosecutor, and Tim Walz used to be an NRA fan. Not any more.
* Reports from Ukraine indicate that AFUkraine has refined the use of quadcopter drones in trench warfare. The drones can fly directly over trenches and drop bombs into them, and they can fly into the entryways of bunkers. Swarms of drones can wipe out a strongpoint.
DAYLOG FRI 13 SEP 24: Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg -- yes, I have learned how to reliably spell that name -- was on FOX, which he seems to enjoy doing. Bret Baier asked why Elon Musk wasn't invited to a White House meeting on tailpipe emissions. Pete replied, deadpan, that electric cars don't have tailpipes. FOX ALWAYS their panties handed to them by Pete, and they never learn. No wonder he likes to talk to them.
* I've become fond of Google Assistant, finding it useful all day -- quick calculations, lights on and off, weather, and so on. Only problem was I using an old smartphone, always ON and on a stand, and that left something to be desired. Smartphones are not really designed for continuous operation, and they don't have good "ears" to pick up commands from across the room. I bought a cheap remaindered ChromeBook as a potential better tool, but didn't get anywhere with it.
About two weeks ago I came across the obvious answer: Google Nest Hub smart speaker / display. It was only $107 USD all told, so I bought it. It was supposed to come in Monday, but it got here today, and I just had to set it up right away.
First problem: It came up in Chinese text, with Mandarin voice output. Instructions told me to download the Google Home app from the Google Store onto my smartphone. Second problem: I couldn't hook up Google Home with the app, until I figured out I had to use the smartphone camera to scan the barcode on the Nest Hub display. There was a barcode in the printed instructions, but it didn't work.
After that, configuration was no great problem. The Nest Hub's "ears" are much better, they haven't missed commands so far. It's in my bedroom / office, and it will pick me up even from the living room. Making "hands-off" phone calls is a lot more workable. I went purely digital with the phone -- with a Google Voice number -- a long time ago, but it hasn't been as convenient as a landline phone. Now it's more convenient. Anyway, now I'm back using Google Assistant as before, with only a few hours interruption.
Further tinkering gave me things I probably could have done before, but hadn't tried. "Hey Google, play Thelonius Monk's STRAIGHT NO CHASER." It gave me a YouTube music video of a Monk performance. Working from there, I figured I could get other YouTube videos: "Hey Google, find a video about configuring the Google Nest Hub." It gave me a set. I'll tinker with it some more until I run out of steam on that.
* It's Friday the 13th ... I got to wondering how often it happened, but on thinking it out, it's simple. There's a single 13th in every month, it can happen on any day, so it's like 7 months on average. MS Copilot verifies that.
AND SO ON: The Russians have been making considerable use of the Iranian Shahed-136 k-drone in attacks on Ukraine. It's slow and noisy, but very cheap, and the Russians are now building it themselves in a factory in Alabuga, Tatarstan. Incidentally, the factory is at present only assembling Shaheds from Iranian-supplied kits; the goal is to work up to 100% Russian-built Shaheds -- but examination of the factory operation suggests it doesn't have much potential, with the real goal being to soak Putin for money.
Anyway, Shaheds were originally sent in at low altitudes to evade radar, but the Ukrainians set up a network of thousands of smart microphones to detect and track the noisy k-drones -- which the Ukrainians call "mopeds" for the sounds they make. Ground-based mobile air-defense units take out the Shaheds, with weapons ranging from the excellent German Gephard (Cheetah) flakpanzer, with twin cannon, to pickup trucks with twin antique Maxim 1910 machine guns. Ukraine inherited huge stockpiles of Soviet weapons after independence, and there are probably a lot of old Maxims left. Even the Maxims are effective enough, with the mobile groups able to intercept more than 80% of the Shaheds.
That being the case, the Russians are now flying Shaheds in at several kilometers altitude, out of the range of the mobile groups. Although the Shaheds can be detected and tracked by Ukraine's radar network -- of which little is said or known -- missiles generally have to be used to shoot the k-drones down, and they're a lot cheaper than the missiles. That's led to schemes to use civil aircraft to shoot them down, but it seems the best option is the Mil Mi-35 "Hind" gunship helicopter -- which is well faster than the drones, and has a 23-millimeter cannon turret in the nose that can take out the k-drones easily. Probably the solution over the longer run are jet-powered drone interceptors, little robot jet fighters maybe like 3 meters / 10 feet long, armed with a rapid-fire machine gun, hunting with an infrared sensor.
In the meantime, Ukraine is also making use of its wide-area Pokrova electronic countermeasures network to confuse Shaheds with fake navigation signals. It's nothing unusual for Shaheds to come to rest in Ukrainian farm fields. They even get spoofed to head back to Russia, or end up who knows where. A good number of the Shaheds not shot down don't hit their targets.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* KAMALA HARRIS (7): Bill Clinton won re-election to the White House in 1996, much to the frustration of Newt Gingrich and the Republicans. They resented Clinton's smear jobs on them, though they were generally a reflection of the smear jobs of Republicans against the despised "liberals". The consequent gridlock fed popular distrust of both parties, though Clinton had the advantage of a booming economy. He was even able to enjoy balanced budgets from 1997.
Things went badly south for Clinton in early 1998, when it came to light that, in an appalling display of poor judgement, he had been having an affair with an eager young White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. The scandal would cast a shadow over the remainder of his term of office. However, it didn't do the Republicans much good either; they attempted to impeach Clinton, but he handily survived the vote, and the Republicans' single-minded focus on taking down Clinton did not impress the voters. The GOP did poorly in the 1998 mid-terms, with Gingrich deposed as House Speaker as a result.
* In that same year, 1998, Kamala got a new job in the San Francisco district attorney's office, across the bay, being put in charge of the "career criminal" unit, dealing with hardened lawbreakers. It was a promotion, putting her in a supervisory role, but she had heard ugly rumors about the SF DA's office, painting it as a toxic mess. After she arrived, she gradually found out the rumors were all true, the staff suffering from layoffs and a backstabbing work environment -- as well disorganization and a lack of tools. There were few computers, no email, no database; the case backlog was bottomless, and the operation was seen as a joke by the police and other players in the system.
It would be inspiring to say that Kamala charged in and put everything right, but that isn't what happened. The experience was, as she put it, "incredibly frustrating." She spent 18 months spinning her wheels there -- but then she got a call from Louise Renne, the San Francisco city attorney, the first woman in that job. Renne had an opening in her office to head a group that handled child and family services. After discussion, Kamala signed up. She started out setting up a task force to deal with sexually exploited youth, leveraging off expert help:
QUOTE:
Norma Hotaling was my partner in that effort. She had firsthand experience with the challenges we were tackling. She had been abused as a girl, and ended up homeless and addicted to heroin. She was arrested for prostitution more than thirty times. But hers was one of the few such stories with a happy ending. Norma got clean. She went to college. She got a degree in health education. And as soon as she graduated, she put that degree to use, creating a program to rescue women from prostitution that is still widely used today.
END_QUOTE
One of the difficulties with trying to rescue teen prostitutes was that, once the justice system let go of them, they quickly gravitated back to their old ways -- for the simple reason that they didn't have anywhere else to go, many of them having escaped from dysfunctional households. The task force accordingly promoted the creation of a "safe house" where they could get consistent support and assistance -- as well as a crackdown on "massage parlors" that were hubs for prostitution.
The task force's recommendations were accepted by the powers-that-be. The safe house was accordingly set up, with an advertising campaign generated to make sure kids on the street knew where to go for help if they wanted it. In the meantime, law enforcement shut down dozens of brothels. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Dirt-Powered Fuel Cell Draws Near-Limitless Energy From Soil" by Loz Blain, 16 January 2024), fuel cells have been around since the 19th century, but they have yet to become widespread. A research team at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has now demonstrated a fuel cell with potentially wide application -- devising a paperback-sized fuel cell module that's buried in soil, to then harvest power created as microbes break down dirt, for as long as there's carbon in the soil.
Such "microbial fuel cells (MFC)" have been around for more than a century. They somewhat resemble batteries, in having an anode, cathode, and electrolyte -- but instead of getting electricity from electrode reactions, they get it from the metabolism of bacteria living in the soil.
The traditional problem with MFCs is keeping them supplied with water and oxygen, while being buried. Project lead Bill Yen says: "Although MFCs have existed as a concept for more than a century, their unreliable performance and low output power have stymied efforts to make practical use of them, especially in low-moisture conditions."
The NWU team tinkered with a set of designs, finally settling on a slender upright box sitting on a flat disk base. The base was the cathode, with the anode clipped onto the box. The MFC was buried in the soil so only its top could be seen. The box provided airflow to the unit. It was potentially easy and cheap to manufacture, being of simple configuration and not requiring expensive materials.
In testing, this design performed consistently across different soil moisture levels, from completely underwater to "somewhat dry," with just 41% water by volume in the soil. On average, it generated some 68 times more power than was required to operate its onboard moisture and touch detection systems, and transmit data via a tiny antenna to a nearby base station.
The MFC's power output is low; it can't be used to run even a smartphone. The goal is more to power small sensors that can run over the long term without needing regular battery changes. Farmers could use the tech to build a soil monitoring network, for example, that would require little maintenance. Yen says: "As long as there is organic carbon in the soil for the microbes to break down, the fuel cell can potentially last forever."
* Along roughly similar lines, as discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com ("Tiny, Efficient Fuel Cell Runs On Blood Sugar To Power Medical Implants" by Michael Irving, 13 May 2022), implants like pacemakers may need to operate for decades, making batteries an impractical source of electric power. That makes "glucose-powered fuel cells (GFC)" attractive, and there's been considerable work to that end.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have developed an improved take on a GFC. It consists of an anode, an electrolyte and a cathode. The anode reacts with glucose in body fluids, producing gluconic acid, a process that releases two protons and two electrons. The electrons drive an external circuit, while the protons flow through the electrolyte to react with air to produce water.
Electrolytes in GFCs are typically polymers, but the MIT-TUM researchers instead used ceria -- a strong, stable ceramic that conducts protons well and has been used in hydrogen fuel cells. The electrodes were made of platinum, which readily catalyzes glucose reactions.
The final GFCs were tiny, about 300 micrometers wide and only 400 nanometers thick. To test them, the researchers manufactured 150 of them onto silicon wafers, flowed a glucose solution over the top of them and measured their electrical output. The GFCs produced peak voltages of around 80 millivolts, which equates to around 43 microwatts per square centimeter. That's at the high end of performance for GFCs to date, and is enough to power implantable devices.
The ceramic electrolyte makes the GFC sturdier, and more able and withstand the high temperatures of sterilization prior to being implanted. The MIT-TUM researchers envision laying down the GFC directly onto an implant using thin-film layers.
* As discussed in an article from NEWATLAS.com "Giant Sand Battery Holds A Week's Heat For A Whole Town" by Michael Irving, 12 March 2024), energy storage is a big thing these days, with considerable ingenuity being applied to solutions.
For example, Polar Night Energy of Finland has developed an industrial-scale "sand battery" that can store up to 100 MWh of thermal energy for use during cold polar winter nights. This installation will an order of magnitude bigger than a pilot plant set up in 2022.
The sand battery is not much more than a big steel silo of sand, or a comparable solid material, warmed up through a heat exchanger buried in the center, using excess electricity from the grid -- preferably from renewable sources, the power being drawn at low-use times, when it's cheaper. The silo is insulated and the heat doesn't fade away for months. The heat could be used to generate electricity, but it's better used to drive a district heating system, with steam or hot water piped to houses and buildings.
The new sand battery will be 13 meters (47'8") tall and 15 meters (49'2") wide, with an output power of a megawatt and a total capacity of 100 megawatt-hours. It will be an order of magnitude bigger than the original demonstrator. The sand will be crushed soapstone, a manufacturing byproduct of another local industry. This material can, it seems, conduct heat even better than ordinary sand. The new battery should be completed in 2025.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GOLD HYDROGEN (3): If hydrogen is available in volume in accessible underground deposits, it would be much cheaper than any other sort of hydrogen. Denis Briere says extraction at the Mali site, which benefits from shallow wells and nearly pure hydrogen, could be as cheap as 50 cents per kilogram. Ian Munro -- CEO of Helios Aragon, a startup pursuing hydrogen in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees -- envisions break-even costs between 50 and 70 cents. Munro says:
QUOTE:
If it does work, it could revolutionize energy production. There's a big IF there -- but you're not going to get that with green hydrogen, right? To me, that's a bottomless pit.
END_QUOTE
* One big puzzle is that the oil and gas industry has driven millions of wells: if hydrogen deposits really are common, then why have they been overlooked for so long?
One reason is that hydrogen is scarce in the sedimentary rocks that yield oil and gas, such as organic-rich shales or mudstones. When compacted and heated, the carbon molecules in those rocks consume any available hydrogen and form longer chain hydrocarbons, with the resulting oil also taking in hydrogen. In addition, hydrogen can react with oxygen in rocks to form water or combine with carbon dioxide to form "abiotic" methane, while microbes digest it up to make yet more methane. Geologists also doubted that hydrogen could persist underground. It's the smallest molecule there is, capable of leaking through minerals, even metals.
Geoffrey Ellis, a geochemist at USGS, says the reason underground hydrogen was overlooked was because nobody was thinking about it: "The bottom line: they weren't really looking for hydrogen. We weren't looking in the right places with the right tools."
A few actually did look. NHE's Viacheslav Zgonnik says the first known scientific mention of it actually goes back to 1888, when Dmitriy Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table, reported hydrogen seeping from cracks in a coal mine in Ukraine. Zgonnik, who was born and raised in Ukraine, says reports of hydrogen are relatively common throughout the former Soviet Union -- because Soviet researchers were looking for it, chasing after a now-debunked theory of "abiotic oil", in which oil was not produced from the remains of ancient organisms. According to the theory, abiotic oil require natural hydrogen as a major ingredient.
Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a University of Toronto geochemist, got interested in gold hydrogen in the 1980s, when she was a graduate student. She was researching in mines in Canada and Finland, following up hints that they sometimes contained flammable gases. She found expected hydrogen gases, including methane and ethane, but they didn't account for all the mass in her samples. She finally realized that some of the samples contained as much as 30% hydrogen: "We didn't even measure for it, because nobody expected hydrogen in the system."
Hundreds of hydrogen seeps have now been documented around the world. Zgonnik suspects hydrogen can explain hundreds of thousands of shallow, circular depressions in the land, tens or hundreds of meters across, that go by names like "fairy circles", "witch rings", or "water basins".
Surveying several of these features along the US East Coast, where they are called "Carolina bays", Zgonnik and his colleagues found they were leaking hydrogen, and that its concentration grew with depth. Zgonnik thinks that hydrogen dissolves away minerals in underlying rocks, leading to slumping at the surface.
Isabelle Moretti -- a geologist at the University of Pau and the Adour Region -- has documented hydrogen seeping from fairy circles in Brazil, Namibia, and Australia, and found they can be denuded of vegetation. She speculates that the action of hydrogen-loving microbes may be suppressing the vegetation.
Most hydrogen seeps are too weak to be commercially exploitable, but their very existence is striking, with the University of Bern's Eric Gaucher saying they are ...
QUOTE:
... really a miracle. You have oxidant in the soil, oxygen in the atmosphere, and plenty of microbes that love to eat this hydrogen. That it exists at all, there must be more.
END_QUOTE
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* AI SCIENTIST: As discussed in an article from NATURE.com ("Researchers built an 'AI Scientist' -- what can it do?" by Davide Castelvecchi, 30 August 2024), an international team has now developed an "AI Scientist" in an effort to automate the research process.
The AI Scientist was put together by a team at Tokyo company Sakana AI in collaboration with academic labs in Canada and the United Kingdom. It goes through the full research cycle -- reading the literature on a problem, formulating hypothesis for research, devising experiments, and issuing a paper. It even "peer reviews" its own research.
Other research groups are working along the same lines, but AI Scientist is at the front of the pack. Jevin West -- a computational social scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle -- says: "It's impressive that they've done this end-to-end. And I think we should be playing around with these ideas, because there could be potential for helping science."
AI Scientist is a demonstration, not a production system: its output is toylike, and it only does research in machine learning itself. Of course, it can't do physical lab experiments. Gerbrand Ceder -- a materials scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley -- says: "There's still a lot of work to go from AI that makes a hypothesis to implementing that in a robot scientist." Nonetheless, he sees the potential: "If you look into the future, I have zero doubt in mind that this is where much of science will go."
AI Scientist is based on a large language model (LLM). Using a paper that describes a machine learning algorithm as a template, it starts from searching the literature for similar work. It then diverges from the template through an evolutionary algorithm, making small random changes, selecting those that work the best, and then making changes with them. It runs the resulting algorithms to evaluate them, then produces a paper and evaluates it.
The papers AI Scientist produced were trivial, nothing worth publishing in a journal. Critics have also questioned the system's methodology, noting that scientists talk a lot together to come up with ideas or find out what they're doing wrong. However, critics do appreciate the fact that AI Scientist is "open source", allowing them to probe it for weaknesses -- which was much of the point of the exercise.
Work on automating at least parts of the research process is nothing new, going back to the beginnings of AI in the 1950s. At the outset, AI researchers were wildly optimistic, believing that AI capabilities would grow by leaps and bounds -- but constrained by the limits of the available hardware, major progress didn't begin until the 21st century.
A decade ago, the "Automatic Statistician" was able to analyze sets of data and write up its own papers. Ceder and his colleagues managed to automate some bench work: the "robot chemist" they unveiled in 2023 year can synthesize new materials and experiment with them.
Ceder says that even if AI won't able to do the more creative part of the work any time soon, it could still automate a lot of the more repetitive aspects of research. "At the low level, you're trying to analyze what something is, how something responds. That's not the creative part of science, but it's 90% of what we do."
Taking AI Scientist to a new level will involve coming up with hybrid solutions. Recent results on solving math problems by Google Deep Mind, for example, have shown the power of combining LLMs with techniques of "symbolic" AI, which build logical rules into a system, and not just building a system from pure learning. AI is a new frontier; its capabilities even ten years from now are very hard to imagine.
COMMENT ON ARTICLEDAYLOG MON 02 SEP 24: The media is running headlines: "Trump claims he had every right to interfere with election." Oh, more nonsense from Decrepit Donald, how tiresome. If any answer were needed, it would be: Your opinion doesn't count -- only the jury's.
Along similar lines, WAPO ran a headline: "Trump aims to drag down Harris as he scrambles to keep up in tight race." Trump is disintegrating, can do nothing about it, and the race is not really close.
The news made a bit of a fuss about Jeff Walz, Tim Walz's older brother, denouncing Tim and praising Trump. The brothers don't talk to each other any more. This is news? Not really. Trump is shrinking into oblivion, and so will his fans.
* Thinking about the current state of the GOP in the fade-out of the Trump era, I recall thinking that the Republican National Convention would be a massive dumpster fire. As the date approached, however, I got to thinking it would be a whimper instead.
That's what it was. Trump took over the RNC without any resistance. Today, there is no mention of the GOP except in the context of Trump. The only resistance against Trump among Republicans exhibits itself as VOTE FOR KAMALA.
What happens to the GOP after the fall of Trump? I'm thinking it will survive as a small and shrinking fascistic organization, while the rest will either give up politics or become Center Democrats. How welcome they will be is another question.
DAYLOG TUE 03 SEP 24: The new movie REAGAN, with Dennis Quaid in the title role, is getting panned by the critics -- who call it a superficial hagiography, placing Ronald Reagan in a glowingly positive light. However, audience reaction has been overwhelmingly positive.
Well yeah duh. Only people who idolize Reagan would watch it in the 1st place. I admire Reagan in some ways, he had major virtues, & he had a public mandate for his conservative experiment. It terminated in Trump. We tried it; it failed; we learned. Democracy in action.
* A group named "Republican Voters Against Trump" is backing a campaign of commercials and billboard ads in 5 states, promoting the Kamala Campaign. Head of the group, Sarah Longwell, says: "Donald Trump has destroyed the Republican Party."
Not really. The Republicans fell apart; Trump just climbed to the top of the rubble heap, there was nobody left who could get up there and push him off. Now Trump is falling apart in turn. PALMER REPORT accurately pointed out that Trump goes through the motions of campaigning, but they're listless and indifferent. PR further points out that the Trump campaign blows every trick, the Kamala campaign aces every trick.
DAYLOG WED 04 SEP 24: MAGA is making a fuss about Kamala saying she worked at a McDonald's one summer -- their trolling is getting that desperate. I would be very surprised to find out that someone as smart as Kamala would tell such a pointless lie.
It seems the Kamala Campaign's response is: Yes she did. -- and nothing more. Never let trolls control the conversation. If they insist on proof, they can chase it down themselves. She has nothing to prove to them.
A new chart displayed the spending of the two presidential campaigns in a set of battleground states, with Kamala leaving Trump in the dust. It seems Trump is only campaigning to keep legal defense money coming in -- and his minions are likely robbing him blind. Liz Cheney now says she's voting for Kamala. Things will happen to the GOP after the fall of Trump -- but nobody knows exactly what.
* Under the category of: What is wrong with these people? -- from early 2022 to late 2023, a man from Queens named Ade Salim Lilly made over 12,000 threatening phone calls to politicians, calling from Maryland and Puerto Rico. He was finally busted in Puerto Rico, and has now been sentenced to 13 months in prison, followed by several years of probation. Come the Trump Revolution, and it ends up mostly being crank phone calls. I think that is a fad that has no future.
DAYLOG THU 05 SEP 24: The DOJ has now cracked down on a Russian disinformation effort named "Doppelganger", in particular targeting "fake news" website the ring had set up. There is the question of who besides trolls cares about the fake news these days.
The DOJ also went after Troglodyte Right online "influencers" going along with the Russian campaign. They insist that they knew nothing about the Russians, with some news media saying the influencers were "duped". Ridiculous -- they just didn't care who they were taking money from.
* Judge Tanya Chutkan is now performing pretrial hearings on Trump's election-fraud case, with Trump's lame counsel spinning their wheels and annoying the judge: No, you cannot use I'M RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT to defy this court.
On another front, legal advocates are working to get Judge Aileen Cannon taken off Trump's classified documents case. I find that puzzling: she threw the case out on flimsy constitutional pretexts, didn't she remove herself from it?
On still another front, Trump has been appealing to Federal court to get his conviction in the New York "hush-money trial" thrown out on "presidential immunity" grounds. This week, a Federal judge in Manhattan rejected the appeal. It seems Trump is trying again with another Federal court. I doubt it will work better, or even as well.
I got to wondering: If the appeals courts won't hear a complaint, can it still be escalated to the Supreme Court? Investigation reveals it can, but the odds are heavily stacked that the SCOTUS won't hear it, either.
* I run into people on Spout who keep saying we're facing a close election. I reply: "No, we're not." Trump sinks more every week. They often come back with the way Trump was dismissed early on in the 2016 election, but went on to win.
Close examination shows that to be a fake comparison. Trump started out lame in 2016 -- but as the election grew closer, the more Trump frighteningly seemed on a roll, while Hillary went from one stumble to the next. In contrast, in 2024 the positions are reversed: Trump is failing, Kamala is rising. The bottom line is that Trump is merely pathetic.
What led to the underestimation of Trump in 2016 was the fact that nobody realized how hollow the GOP had become. It turned out no Republican politician had anywhere near as much support from GOP voters as Trump, so he just walked in and took over. Another contrast with 2016 was the way that Hillary went from one stumble to the next; absolutely nothing went her way. These days, Trump is the stumblebum, while Kamala flies rings around him.
I'm particularly impressed with how well Kamala understands trolls. She never pays attention to their trash, she just laughs at them. That's the way to do it: Tell them to get a life.
DAYLOG FRI 06 SEP 24: Lockheed Martin just got a $4.8 billion USD contract for two production batches of GMLRS missiles. What is interesting about this is that GMLRS is GPS-guided and doesn't work in Ukraine because of Orc GPS jamming. I suspect these new rockets will not have that problem. What's changed? Nobody's talking. Not incidentally, reports say the Orc offensive from the Donbas appears to be bogging down. General Budanov predicted this. I think they're getting hammered with new munitions.
Also not incidentally, Ukrainians still complain about their Allies "drip-feeding" them weapons beKuZ sKeEreD uF esKaL@shun!!! The Allies were not prepared for this war and are playing catch-up; they fuss about "escalation" to seem stronger than they really are.
There may be another angle. Iran has sold some tactical ballistic missiles to Russia, with the USA calling it "escalation". That gives the USA a pretext to escalate in reply and provide new weapons to Ukraine. In reality, the problem with weapons deliveries seems much more availability than restraint.
* As mentioned, this last week, Liz Cheney said: VOTE FOR KAMALA HARRIS. Even more interesting her dad, Dick Cheney, did so as well. A lot of the Uncompromising Left are contemptuous of GOP For Kamala, but they protest too much. I don't see the point of dumping on people who are, for the moment, working with us instead of against us. What happens over the longer run? I keep saying: I have no clear idea. The last time a major US political party broke up was in the 1850s. We're witnessing history.
* Judge Juan Merchan had scheduled Trump's sentencing in his hush-money trial for 18 September. Today the judge, saying he didn't want to influence the election, put it off to late November. That's disappointing, but not surprising. Trump is a unique case. No worries, he's doomed; locking him up might even help him. Better to let him destroy himself in public. The presidential debate is on 10 September; the Kamala Campaign has agreed to muted mikes. Whatever, the debate makes no difference. The election is already decided.
AND SO ON: Joe Biden's son Hunter was convicted on charges of obtaining a firearm while being a drug addict, with sentencing to take place after the election. He's also facing a trial in California on tax evasion charges. He's pleaded GUILTY now, so that trial may not happen.
He'd copped a plea early on in the investigation, but the judge threw out the plea deal, in effect rejecting his GUILTY plea. That being the case, he had to plead NOT GUILTY for his gun-possession trial. Why did he go back to a GUILTY plea? Possibly his dad stepping down from the presidential race had something to do with it; the Troglodyte Right has to reason to pick on Hunter any more. It is generally thought unlikely that Hunter, as a first offender, will face severe punishment. However, the courts have come across as vindictive against him, so we'll see.
It appears the House MAGA are still going through some motions of trying to impeach Joe Biden. It doesn't seem their hearts are in it, however. Hey, they literally have nothing better to do.
PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* KAMALA HARRIS (6): One of the aspects of the Republican tilt to the Right was an effort -- pushed by the Federalist Society, an association of conservative judges and legal minds -- to stack the Supreme Court to the Right, with SCOTUS then tearing down laws passed by liberal administrations.
In 1992, Justice Thurgood Marshall retired, with the Bush I Administration nominating Clarence Thomas, previously chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Thomas, being a black conservative, was seen by the White House as the ideal replacement for Marshall.
Delaware Senator Joe Biden, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, didn't think highly of Thomas, believing him unqualified to be a SCOTUS justice. During the Judiciary hearings for the nomination, Thomas all but bluntly refused to describe his judicial philosophy. When asked what he thought of ROE V. WADE, the 1973 SCOTUS decision that guaranteed the right to abortion, Thomas blandly claimed he'd never thought about it at all -- an assertion that did not go over well with the committee.
Since the Democrats controlled the Senate at the time, it seemed unlikely that Thomas would be confirmed -- but then accusations of sexual harassment emerged. Thomas of course indignantly denied everything, claiming he was being subjected to a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks". To Joe Biden's exasperation, Thomas was narrowly confirmed, with Democrat senators voting to push him over the top. The implication was that, in the male-dominated Senate, the accusations had created sympathy for Thomas. As a SCOTUS justice, Thomas's decisions would invariably fall well to the Right.
* Although George H.W. Bush's popularity had been sky-high after the First Gulf War, there had long been doubts among the GOP faithful of his commitment to the Reagan Revolution. When he ran for re-election in 1992, an economic recession, which would prove short-lived, was in progress -- and so Bush was voted out, being replaced by Democrat Bill Clinton, previously governor of Arkansas.
Clinton, having taken to heart the overwhelming popularity of Ronald Reagan, had campaigned strictly from the Center Left -- deliberately snubbing the UC Left, much to their lasting fury. He took ambitious actions after going into office, most significantly attempting to promote a national health care plan. That was a nonstarter; there wasn't enough support for it. Worse, he delegated leadership of the effort to his wife Hillary. She had been his chief aide when he was governor of Arkansas, but the idea of the First Lady having substantial power in the White House did not go over well with the public.
In reality, first ladies had often enjoyed considerable political power, but it was always behind the scenes. The public cry went up: "We never voted for her!" -- oblivious to the fact that, as a rule, they hadn't voted for Bill Clinton's cabinet officers and other senior White House officials either. In any case, the national health care plan went nowhere, and on top of that the media developed an unrelenting contempt for Hillary Clinton, rarely saying anything good about her.
That was consistent with a general deterioration in the tone of public discourse as the Troglodyte (TG) Right grew in power, their voice being that of malevolent radio "talk jocks" like Rush Limbaugh, with advocacy organizations like the Heritage Foundation spreading the message more quietly. The message was unyielding hostility to diversity, gay and abortion rights, gun-control laws, environmental action -- working to undo every bit of progressive action going back to the 1930s and before. It was distilled into a list, the "Contract With America (CWA)", as a Republican platform for the 1994 mid-term elections.
The message was strong enough to allow the Republicans to take back the House of Representatives in the mid-terms for the first time in decades, with Newt Gingrich of Georgia, one of the architects of the CWA, becoming House Speaker. Gingrich represented the new wave of Republican politician, echoing the radio talk jocks, with a weak sense of principles and willing to do anything to win. The Senate also came under Republican control, furthering America's shift to the Right. However, trying to implement the Contract With America with Bill Clinton in the White House was an uphill fight.
One element of the CWA that did have bipartisan support was a push to "get tough on crime". It had been brewing from the 1980s, to culminate in the "1994 Crime Bill", Joe Biden having been one of its major backers. It was a comprehensive package of measures, some of which were sensible -- including a limited assault-weapons ban, and a "Violence Against Women Act" pushed through by Biden. On the other hand, the crime bill led to surging imprisonments, many on drug charges, with minorities being hit the worst. [TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT | COMMENT ON ARTICLE* SCIENCE NOTES: As discussed in an article from ECONOMIST.com ("What Are Hycean Worlds, A Proposed New Habitat For Life?", 13 September 2023), hundreds of planets orbiting other suns have now been located. It's hard to determine too much about such "exoplanets", but more is being learned about them.
About 124 light-years from Earth, a planet labeled "K2-18 b" orbits a nondescript star in the constellation Leo. It was one of the thousands of exoplanets discovered by the Kepler orbiting observatory,
In 2019 observations by the Hubble Space Telescope suggested the planet might have water in its atmosphere, which hinted at the possibility that K2-18 b might be a habitable planet like Earth. In 2023, a team led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge announced that observations made with the more capable James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggested K2-18 b might be what is called a "Hycean world". The term "Hycean" was coined by Madhusudhan a few years ago, being short for "hydrogen planet". We've never actually identified any Hycean planets, but they could exist in principle.
Observations of exoplanets generally provide astronomers little more than an orbit, a mass and a radius. If the radius and mass match something seen in our Solar System, they can make an educated guess at the object's inner structure: An exoplanet the size and mass of the Earth is probably rocky. However, with a radius 2.6 times that of the Earth, and a mass around nine times higher, K2-18 b is well bigger than any of the inner solar system's rocky planets -- while also much smaller than the giant planets of the outer solar system: Just half the mass of Neptune, less than 3% the mass of Jupiter.
According to Madhusudhan, a Hycean planet would have a core of rock and iron about the size of Earth, covered by an unbroken ocean thousands of kilometers deep, topped off with a relatively thin atmosphere composed of light gas, presumably hydrogen. The mass and radius of K2-18 b fits that model. Models predict the atmosphere of such a planet should contain carbon dioxide and methane, and both were found by spectroscopic analysis of JWST observations. There was also a tentative identification of dimethyl sulphide, a molecule which on Earth is only made by life, most notably by plankton. It may not actually be produced by life-processes on K2-18 b, but the observation is suggestive.
The sorts of processes that would produce methane in such an atmosphere should also produce ammonia. Ammonia was not seen, but it would dissolve in an underlying ocean in a way that methane would not, so only methane remains in the atmosphere.
However, none of this is enough to proved that K2-18b is a Hycean world. The depth of the atmosphere in Madhusudhan's model is very significant. If it is just a bit too thick, the resulting greenhouse effect would make liquid oceans impossible; the lower reaches would consist of water in a very hot, high pressure, "supercritical" state not consistent with life. Skeptics suggest the existence of Hycean worlds is dependent on a degree of "fine-tuning", possessing an atmosphere thick enough not to be lost to space but thin enough not to set off a runaway greenhouse effect in its depths. Observations do not rule out that K2-18b is just another "sauna hell-planet". Further observations are needed to figure out exactly what the planet is.
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("Sand Clouds Are Common In Atmospheres Of Brown Dwarfs" by Lisa Grossman, 8 July 2022), silicon is a relatively common element in the Universe. Astronomers have now found, on inspecting archival data, that clouds made of hot silicate minerals are common in the "brown dwarfs", or substars.
In 2004, astronomers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to observe brown dwarfs and spotted spectral signatures of sand -- more specifically, grains of silicate minerals such as quartz and olivine. A few more tentative examples of sand clouds were spotted in 2006 and 2008.
Planetary scientist Mark Marley -- of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who was involved in one of those early discoveries -- says that floating in one of these clouds would feel like being in a sandstorm: "If you could take a scoop out of it and bring it home, you would have hot sand."
Astronomers at the time found six examples of these silicate clouds. Marley didn't think any more would be found, since the Spitzer telescope ran out of helium coolant in 2009, and was no longer capable of observing brown dwarf sand clouds.
However, astronomer Genaro Suarez -- of the University of Western Ontario -- was inspecting Spitzer data for a separate project, to realize that the archive contained data on dozens of brown dwarfs that hadn't been examined. He and his colleagues accordingly inspected all low-mass stars and brown dwarfs observed by Spitzer -- 113 objects in total, 68 of which had never been published before.
Not every brown dwarf in the sample showed clear signs of silicate clouds -- but collectively, the brown dwarfs followed a trend. For dwarfs and low-mass stars hotter than about 1700 degrees Celsius, silicates exist as a vapor, and the objects show no signs of clouds. Below that temperature, signs of clouds start to appear, becoming thickest around 1300C. The signature disappears for brown dwarfs that are cooler than about 1000C, as the clouds sink deep into the atmospheres.
The finding confirms earlier suspicions that silicate clouds are nothing unusual, and shows the conditions under which they form. Because brown dwarfs are born hot and cool down over time, most of them should see each phase of sand cloud evolution as they age.
COMMENT ON ARTICLE* GOLD HYDROGEN (2): Emily Yedinak -- a materials scientist who devoted a fellowship at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to drumming up interest in natural hydrogen -- says:
QUOTE:
When I first heard about it, I thought it was crazy. The more that I read, the more I started to realize, wow, the science behind how hydrogen is produced is sound ... I was kind of like: "Why is no one talking about this?"
END_QUOTE
However, from 2018 -- when Diallo and his colleagues described the Malian field in the science press -- people were indeed talking about it, with research papers piling up rapidly. Was it truly possible that there was a massive clean energy source right beneath our feet, and nobody had thought of it? Geologist Alain Prinzhofer -- lead author on the Mali paper and scientific director of GEO4U, a Brazil-based oil and gas services company heavily involved in natural hydrogen -- says of the new-found excitement: "It's absolutely incredible and really exponential."
Dozens of startups, many in Australia, are obtaining the rights to explore for hydrogen. In 2022, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists formed its first natural hydrogen committee, and USGS began its first effort to identify promising hydrogen production zones in the USA. The first hydrogen borehole in the USA was drilled in Nebraska in 2019 by Natural Hydrogen Energy (NHE), a startup company. Viacheslav Zgonnik, a geochemist and CEO of NHE, says:
QUOTE:
We're in the very beginning, but it will go fast. ... I believe that [natural hydrogen] has the potential to replace all fossil fuels. That's a very large statement, I know.
END_QUOTE
What makes natural particularly enticing is that it may be renewable. It takes millions of years for buried and compressed organic deposits to turn into oil and gas -- but natural hydrogen is always being generated, when underground water reacts with iron minerals at elevated temperatures and pressures. Prinzhofer says that in the decade since boreholes began to tap hydrogen in Mali, flows have not diminished: "Hydrogen appears, almost everywhere, as a renewable source of energy, not a fossil one."
Natural hydrogen sounds great on paper, but is there really anything useful there? Researchers have only vague notions of how it forms and migrates and -- critically -- if it can accumulate in a commercially-exploitable way. Frederic-Victor Donze -- a geophysicist at Grenoble Alpes University -- says: "Interest is growing fast, but the scientific facts are still lacking." Big Oil is cautious, allowing wildcatters to take on the risky exploratory work. The Mali field is still not a going concern, and elsewhere only a few exploratory wells have been bored.
Some researchers are nonetheless true believers. Eric Gaucher, a geochemist at the University of Bern, left a career at French oil giant Total because it was moving too slowly on hydrogen. He believes the Mali discovery might end up in the history books alongside one that happened in 1859 years ago in Titusville, Pennsylvania. A nearly bankrupt prospector named Edwin Drake, working in Titusville with a steam engine and cast-iron drill pipes, struck black gold -- and set off a rush to drill oil that continues today. Gaucher says:
QUOTE:
I am thinking we are not very far from that with hydrogen. We have the concept, we have the tools, the geology. ... We only need people able to invest.
END_QUOTE
[TO BE CONTINUED]
START | PREV | NEXT |* PANDEMIC & SUPERBUGS: As discussed in an article from NPR.org ("How the pandemic gave power to superbugs" by Gabrielle Emanuel, 29 March 2024), the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020:2022 was a global calamity, with consequences that are still being worked out. One problem was that, as revealed in data from the World Health Organization about 75% of patients all over the world who were hospitalized with COVID were given antibiotics, despite only 8% having a bacterial co-infection where antibiotics would be medically useful. Antibiotics do nothing against a virus.
WHO says the antibiotics were often used "just in case" they could help. Dr. Helen Boucher -- dean of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, not involved in the WHO study, says that two factors were involved in overprescription of antibiotics:
According to the WHO study, The region with the lowest antibiotic use during the pandemic, 33%, was the Western Pacific region, ranging from Australia to China. The highest use, 83%, was in the Eastern Mediterranean and parts of Africa. There was also variation over time: Prescriptions dropped between 2020 and 2022 in Europe and the Americas, while they went up in Africa. Boucher says:
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In low- and middle-income countries, there was less access to diagnostic tests -- significantly less -- and there was less access to vaccination early in the pandemic. And so, the only tool that many of these health care givers might have had were antibiotics. That's not an excuse, but it might be an explanation.
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Antibiotic-resistant pathogens (ARP) are not a new problem, but the pandemic aggravated it -- with at least 1.2 million deaths were directly caused by ARPs, the problem being made worse by poor sanitation measures. Most of the deaths were in low- and middle-income countries, but Boucher says she has lost patients to ARPs as well. She adds that wasn't the case when she started her career 30 years ago.
Up to the pandemic, progress was being made in the fight against ARPs. According to a report from the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, between 2012 and 2017, the number of deaths caused by resistant bugs dropped by nearly 30% in hospitals. That trend then reversed, with researchers from the National Institutes of Health found that, during the pandemic, hospital-acquired ARP infections jumped 32% when compared with data from just before the pandemic -- from 28 cases out of 10,000 hospitalizations to 38 cases out of 10,000 hospitalizations.
Since the end of the pandemic, the number of cases of ARP infections has declined, but not to the level they were before the pandemic. The United Nations General Assembly plans to convene a high-level meeting on how best to address the issue of antimicrobial resistance, and how to keep it from getting worse.
COMMENT ON ARTICLEDAYLOG MON 26 AUG 24: Cantankerous Cajun James Carville is on the warpath again, doomsplaining that Kamala Harris' good poll numbers are misleading. I believe they are -- but they are underestimates. I think he should be labeled "Wrong Way Carville" from now on.
* Rex Huppke of USA TODAY penned an editorial with a title that tells all: "DNC showed Harris campaign is dismissing the noise from Trump and pundits. It's working."
Huppke said: "The Democrats stopped acting scared of Trump and his false aura of inevitability and started behaving like they're running against an almost comically bad candidate who carries more baggage than Chicago's O'Hare International Airport at Christmastime. They stopped fearing the pundits who were holding Biden to an entirely different standard as a candidate, effectively normalizing Trump and glossing over his serial dishonesty, age, and rampant incoherence."
Huppke said that the Kamala Campaign does call out ugly policy proposals churned out, wildly inconsistently, by Trump, but otherwise make him out to be "a washed-up clown".
As far as the press goes: "The same political press that sanitizes Trump's nonsense will turn to the Harris campaign and demand one-on-one interviews and press conferences and greater detail on the vice president's policy proposals. Her message in response seems to be something akin to: We'll speak on my terms, not yours, and we've already released more policy particulars than our opponent. The Kamala Campaign talks a lot and issues a stream of documents on everything important.
" ... I'm not in favor of politicians ducking the media. But what Harris is doing is not ducking. She's smartly seeking a level playing field from news outlets that have failed to accurately reckon with a congenital liar and, to quote Harris, an unserious man."
And another thing: Trump and Kamala are to debate on 10 September, but he's complaining because Kamala insists on continuous live mikes. That's a switch from the last debate; clearly, Kamala expects to bully him, not the other way around.
DAYLOG TUE 27 AUG 24: Donald Trump's Federal trial for election fraud in the court of Judge Tanya Chutkan was derailed by the Supreme Court's confusing verdict on presidential immunity -- but the derailing, as might have been expected, was temporary.
Today, Federal Prosecutor Jack Smith re-introduced his indictment in the case, sanitized to conform to the directives of SCOTUS -- clearly tricky to do, but Smith is also clearly up to the job. This is the biggest Trump trial; I don't think he can dodge it again.
* There's still some fussing about the Trump-Kamala debate on 10 September, concerning Kamala's insistence on open mikes. Trump always gaslights his debates, so it's not necessarily the case that he's looking for an out.
Besides, Trump is officially saying that's a show-stopper, but more quietly -- at least by his standards -- says he doesn't care. It appears it's the people around him who don't like the open mikes, since Trump's inability to behave himself will be more much more evident. In reality, it's unlikely the debate will amount to anything; it won't move the needle one way or another. It has nothing to do with what the campaign is all about.
* It seems that 2nd Gentleman Doug Emhoff's two grown kids, Cole and Ella, are to no surprise drawing intense flak from the MAGA trolls, with Ella -- who has a higher profile -- taking most of the heat. It was exactly what I expected of the trolls.
That scenario sent me back about 50 years, listening to the radio in the dark in an almost-unfurnished apartment. A song came out, with the singer including a monologue. I didn't know who she was, still don't, but as best I remember it went:
"When I was a little girl, my mama told me: 'There are people who don't have anything, don't want anything, & don't want you to have anything either. Protect yourself.'" We are headed out of the Trump Era, but we're not out of it yet.
DAYLOG WED 28 AUG 24: I was curious about Jack Smith's new indictment of Donald Trump on Federal election-stealing charges, wondering about the details. They've surfaced now, the first item being that the old indictment was junked & the new one approved by a new grand jury.
The new indictment discarded mention of Trump's effort to compromise the DOJ and put his stooges in charge, SCOTUS saying that couldn't be sorted out from the president's official duties. It also made little mention of the involvement of White House officials in the Steal.
Instead, the emphasis was on contacts between Trump and his minions outside the government -- and in one particularly interesting move, it pointed to Trump's attempts to interfere with state elections, which a president has absolutely no right to do. We'll see how it goes now.
* I've been very happy with the Kamala Campaign's "missing no tricks" efficiency, and in particular with the consistent approach of dealing with Trump as the mindless troll that he is. He is not a serious person and should not be treated as one.
Trolls always want to control the conversation and lead it into confusion and chaos. The first rule is: Never argue with a troll. Call them out, mock them, laugh at them -- but always understand that what they are talking is meaningless trash, and should be treated as such.
* F-16s are in combat now in Ukraine, shooting down cruise missiles. Reports say Putin is sending 30,000 troops to deal with the Armed Forces Ukraine incursion into Kursk Oblast. I'm betting those troops will be slaughtered. The predicate for this offensive was to have a lot of firepower, with precision munitions that the Orcs can't defeat any more. In addition, the supplies of weapons are increasing, and it will keep getting worse for the Orcs.
* Regarding the late Thomas Matthew Crooks, who shot up a Trump rally, the FBI says his online activities suggest that he was just looking for some place to shoot up. There's a lot of suspicion that the event was staged, but the Trump gang is inept: they would get caught doing that.
DAYLOG THU 29 AUG 24: A Brazilian justice has told Elon Musk that his Xitter social-media service will be blocked in Brazil unless he complies with the court's moderation dictates. The Musk Rat has been consistently stiffing the court; patience appears to be running out.
To be sure, the Musk Rat often displays defiance, then backs off. The problem is that Xitter is so corrupted that there's nothing he can do to fix the damage -- he can't if he wanted to. Xitter is going down the drain, it's just a question of time.
This leads to the other interesting question: where does br.gov go from Xitter? We had an influx of Brazilians into Spoutible at one time; it would help Spout a lot to have governments sign up. Given that Spout is moderation paradise, Spout would seem the best place to go.
* A few weeks back, we had a big hailstorm in NE Colorado that caused quite a bit of damage. I live in a duplex home; my neighbor told me that our roof was badly damaged and had to be replaced.
Huh? I went up topside and looked around, to find it the roof mildly bruised. I left my neighbor a note saying the roof was only 9 years old, and it used triple-thick "architectural" asphalt shingles, instead of the thin 3-tab shingles.
I wasn't thinking he would listen. Sure enough, today he came by to tell me the roof really was in bad shape, but the damage couldn't be seen. I thought to myself: If the damage is invisible, then how do they know? The conversation went downhill from there.
He told me that it was problematic to only re-roof half the house, to which I replied: "Not my problem." He rattled on, oblivious, and I finally cut him off abruptly: "Are we done now?!" That caught him short, and he backpedaled out of my space.
Falling for a blatant roofing scam was bad enough, but he was trying to sell me on the scam, too. I wasn't surprised, because he's an evangelical Trump voter. I'm certain he's voted for Trump twice, & I wouldn't be surprised if he will do it a 3rd time. I leave my clueless neighbor alone.
I got to wondering later: How did the roofers know about the invisible damage to the roof? Did they use dowsing rods? Then I got to wondering if any of them actually did -- scammers are fond of dowsing rods. However, I checked online, and it doesn't appear roofers make any use of them.
DAYLOG FRI 30 AUG 24: Brazil has now pulled the plug on Xitter. This may be the beginning of its end. Will the EU follow Brazil? The EU already on the Musk Rat's case, and fixing Xitter is simply impossible.
* Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were interviewed by CNN's Dana Bash yesterday, with the interview going very well for Kamala and Tim. Yeah, it was mostly political boilerplate, but it had its moments: when asked about some of Trump's rantings, Kamala simply laughed it off.
Longer answer: Trump can hike off Planet Earth. The legacy media sniped at the interview a bit, but the truth is that what the LM thinks is no longer important.
* Agitation on Spout seems to be at a high level at the moment, one item being the claim that the assassination attempt on Trump was fake, it was staged. The only reason to believe that is from various discrepancies in the story, but we get as much from any complicated event.
The problem with focusing on discrepancies in the story is that they can't be followed up to obtain useful leads. Conspiracy stories never have hard evidence. It appears conspiracy paranoids all graduated from Dunning-Krueger University. As of late, I've been quietly blocking a number of the noisier Spouters. It's for the best: I don't see them, they don't see me, everyone is happy.
AND SO ON: I kind of miss the public presence of Frau Merkel, once German's chancellor. However, she is getting a second life in a German TV, "Miss Merkel", in which she becomes an amateur detective like one out of Agatha Christie. Miss Merkel is played by actress Katharina Thalbach. Like Merkel, Thalbach is 70 and from former East Germany.
On being asked about the show, Frau Merkel just said her office staff were big fans. The books the show is based on were written by one David Safier, who came up with the idea in 2019, when Merkel announced her retirement. He saw a rerun of the old COLUMBO TV show at the same time, and the idea popped into place.
Safier says Angela Merkel makes for a consummate detective: "Merkel is highly intelligent, much more intelligent than other politicians. She is strongheaded. And, after 30 years in politics, she's used to dealing with sociopaths and psychopaths." Yes, since Merkel has a doctorate in physical chemistry with a focus on quantum chemistry, she comes across as brainier than most world leaders.
* In vaguely parallel news, a Taiwanese lad named Xu Ruixian got a public commendation for being part of a group of people who tackled a knife-wielding man cutting up people on a commuter train. Xu, who described himself as an "otaku" -- a hard-core anime fan -- said he was inspired to bravery by the example of Himmel, the hero in the anime fantasy adventure FRIEREN: BEYOND JOURNEY'S END. Xu said: "If Himmel was there, he would've done the same thing."
Xu suggested that identifying himself as an otaku would help improve the nerdy public image of anime fans. Photos of Xu accepting the commendation show him to be an appealingly baby-faced lad, with long straight black hair, wearing dark purple clothes with embroidered cuff patterns.
Incidentally, FRIEREN is a well-produced, easy-going anime series. Frieren was the elfin mage of the fantasy quest band led by Himmel, which defeats the Demon King. The skew in the story is that happened 80 years before the story takes place, 30 years after Himmel died. Frieren is a thousand years old and has an entirely different sense of time than humans; Himmel was madly in love with Frieren, but she didn't realize it until long after he was gone.
There are fun details in the series. She's on a quest with a teen mage and a teen warrior, retracing the steps of the quest 80 years earlier. The only baggage they have is a small lightweight suitcase that Frieren carries around. It finally becomes obvious that the suitcase is a portal into some extra-dimensional space that has the capacity of a warehouse.
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