* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.
* THE WEEK THAT WAS: This last week was marked by the testimony of Donald Trump's adult children at his civil-suit tax-evasion trial in New York State. Testimony by sons Don JR and Eric was along the lines of: "We don't worry about the financial details, that's somebody else's job." It didn't fly well. One Xitter commenter noted:
Dr. Mike Davis / @FrankMikeDavis1: New Federal Holiday declared by Trump: "Take Your Family to Court Week"!
Eric Trump announced to the world that the Trumps would "win the case", oblivious to the reality that they've already been judged guilty of fraud, the current trial being to assess the penalties. Michael Cohen, a former Trump attorney who is now a noisy Trump enemy, suggested the two sons lied under oath and were "emulating their father" -- adding: "I mean, the guy lies the way you breathe, and the kids are doing the same thing. How stupid do they have to be?"
In the meantime, the judge in charge, Justice Arthur Engoron of the New York City bench, has been growing increasingly irritable with Trump's legal counsel. Trump attorney Chris Kise complained about the judge passing notes back and forth to his clerk, Allison Greenfield -- a perfectly normal courtroom procedure -- with Justice Engoron angrily shooting back: "I have an absolute unfettered right to get advice from my principal law clerk!"
Justice Engoron ended up expanding his existing gag order against Donald Trump to include his legal counsel. Of course, the Trump gang appealed the gag order.
Eric Holder, previously Obama's attorney general, told MSNBC's Jen Psaki that former President Trump would be thrown in jail if he were a "normal person" for violating a gag order. However, Holder said he does not expect the judge will discipline Trump in such a way.
Holder said he expects Trump will eventually violate his reinstated gag order -- which he described as pretty limited and reasonable -- but said the judge will have to make tough decisions about how to respond: "Would a judge actually do that which would happen to a normal person, and put somebody in jail for violating a ... gag order? I suspect that's not likely to happen with this defendant, but any other defendant would probably be facing [jail time]."
Holder noted there is a range of possible disciplinary options to consider if Trump violates the gag order, such as imposing fines or restricting Trump's access to his social media platform, Truth Social. Holder emphasized, however, that he would be "extremely reluctant" to put Trump in jail for violating the gag order, which Judge Tanya Chutkan reinstated Sunday in the Federal case related to Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The gag order specifies Trump cannot attack certain people involved in the case, but it does not restrict his right to discuss the case generally.
Holder said: "I'd try to be as creative as possible if I were the judge, but I'd be extremely reluctant to take a person who's a former president, the leading candidate of one of our major parties, and actually put him in jail." He commented: "This is already a pretty divided nation, and to do something like that -- to take somebody off the campaign trail, to put him in jail. I just would be very reluctant, really reluctant to do that."
There's a lot of frustration over the reluctance of the courts to jail Trump, but there's a major factor involved: tilting a jury towards Trump. Trump's only defense against all the crimes he's been indicted for is to scream: POLITICAL PERSECUTION! Lending that any weight might be a bad idea.
Incidentally, Trump has, in the midst of his many ramblings about such things as whales, somehow, being killed by wind turbines, has compared his persecution to that of Nelson Mandela. Stephen Colbert said he didn't mind that, "especially the part where he goes to jail for 27 years."
Life will be much quieter after Trump drops out of sight, but quiet will be good; the moving finger, having writ, will move on. Adam Kinzinger, previously a House Representative who participated in the House investigation of Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, commented: "I think in 10 years, if you could fast-forward, there's not going to be a single person on Earth that ever admits that they believed that Donald Trump was innocent."
Trump is going to check out, sooner or later, with one Xitter poster commenting:
Sundae_Divine: I hope when Trump dies he gets cremated, and the guy working the oven says: "You're fired" -- and laughs.
I thought that was cruel, and very funny. Incidentally, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's flagging presidential campaign took another hit in an interview with Kristen Welker of NBC NEWS -- when he talked about falling crime rates in Florida, and Welker shot back that Florida's firearms deaths had actually increased under DeSantis. He tried to rebut her, but she just moved on to the next question, to slap him around again.
Welker was criticized for not paying attention to the rebuttals, but she played that right. He told a whopper lie, she called him on it, he would come up with more whoppers in response. He was trying to regain control of the narrative. "Don't let him do it." She cut him down to size.
* As discussed in a press release from drone-maker SYPAQ -- of Melbourne, Australia -- Ukrainian military are now obtaining SYPAQ's "Corvo" drone AKA "Precision Payload Delivery System (PPDS)", which is a tailless cargo drone featuring a cardboard airframe.
Corvo drones are delivered as flatpack sets, and then assembled, it appears with tape, glue, and rubber straps. The most elaborate tool required for assembly is a wrench to mount the tractor motor / propeller. Once completed, the drone has a rectangular wing, a boxy fuselage, and a tailfin. It can carry a 3-kilogram (6.6-pound) payload and fly up to 120 kilometers (75 miles), flying a pre-programmed course with waypoints. SYPAQ says that a Corvo drone is also adaptable to surveillance missions and can drop grenades.
* My nephew Graham got a Harry Potter wizard outfit for Halloween, so I decided to get myself an Uncle Sam outfit, including stars & stripes socks and star & stripes tennis shoes with LED lights around the soles. It cost me almost $100 USD all told, but I have plenty of money and nothing particularly compelling to spend it on, so why not?
Alas, I only got about a half-dozen trick-or-treaters. It was chilly and having to bundle up seems to have discouraged them. The outfit was well-received, however. The suit itself felt spiffy, but the top hat was kind of a clumsy contraption and didn't fit well. Amazon offers alternative-style Uncle Sam hats, more along the lines of Dr. Seuss hats, so I'll have to buy one of those and see if works better.
One politically-oriented Xwitter poster said he was going to take a Reagan-like approach to trick-or-treating this year:
Jeff Tiedrich / @itsJeffTiedrich: This Halloween, I'll be giving all my candy to the richest child in the neighborhood. I'm sure it will trickle down to all the other kids.
There was a video of Halloween festivities at the White House, with President Joe Biden clowning around with the kids. Secretary of State Tony Blinken was there with his wife and two little kids, the boy wearing fatigues like Volodymyr Zelenskyy's, and the girl wearing a pretty dress in Ukrainian yellow-blue flag colors. I bet that got a lot of attention in Kyiv. Incidentally, it was not possible to find the names of the two kids online -- the Blinkens keep a lid on their personal lives. That makes great sense from a security standpoint.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: General Valeriy Zaluzhny, commander of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), recently released a white paper on the current status of the war there that had a number of interesting insights.
The paper began by reviewing the status of the conflict, showing how the AFU stopped the Russian offensive in 2022 and was able to perform a successful counter-offensive later in the year. However, in 2023 the war settled down into a "positional battle" that favors the Russians, with their much greater manpower. The critical elements in the battle include:
Solutions to these challenges are available. As for air power, responses include:
As for minefields, responses include:
As for artillery, there's a general question of obtain new tubes and more ammunition, but lead times are long. GPS having been neutralized, now the AFU is obtaining smart munitions that don't rely on GPS. As for reserves, it's mostly a question of organization and automation thereof, with a wider net cast for conscription. As far as EW goes, both defensive and offensive EW systems have to be deployed in quantity.
Ukraine has had automated command and control systems from the outset -- of which nothing has been said -- but they need to be refined to make them more powerful and universal. Ukrainian logistics similarly needs to be improved -- but the AFU also needs long-range precision weapons to attack Russian logistics. These weapons will need to be built in Ukraine, since the allies generally don't want their weapons to be used against Russian territory. The allies will provide technical assistance in that effort.
* Along with the release of the paper, ECONOMIST.com interviewed General Zaluzhny, with a number of interesting comments. Concerning the grinding pace of the war during 2023:
QUOTE:
"First I thought there was something wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought maybe our soldiers are not fit for purpose, so I moved soldiers in some brigades," says General Zaluzhny.
When those changes failed to make a difference, the general told his staff to dig out a book he once saw as a student. Its title was BREACHING FORTIFIED DEFENSE LINES. It was published in 1941 by a Soviet major-general, P.S. Smirnov, who analyzed the battles of the First World War.
"And before I got even halfway through it, I realized that is exactly where we are because just like then, the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor."
... General Zaluzhny describes a battlefield in which modern sensors can identify any concentration of forces, and modern precision weapons can destroy it. "The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other," he says.
... arms supplied by the West have been sufficient in sustaining Ukraine in the war, but not enough to allow it to win. General Zaluzhny is not complaining: "They are not obliged to give us anything, and we are grateful for what we have got, but I am simply stating the facts."
... The delay in arms deliveries, though frustrating, is not the main cause of Ukraine's predicament, according to General Zaluzhny. "It is important to understand that this war cannot be won with the weapons of the past generation and outdated methods," he insists. "They will inevitably lead to delay and, as a consequence, defeat." It is, instead, technology that will be decisive, he argues. The general is enthused by recent conversations with Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google, and stresses the decisive role of drones, and of electronic warfare which can prevent them from flying.
END_QUOTE
There is, in short, no "wonder weapon" to win the war -- the AFU simply having to "up its game" with a range of improved technologies, along with the ability to put them to effective use.
This article, though very informative, seemed to suffer from a number of misunderstandings of certain fundamental realities of war:
There is another reality that has yet to be seen: nobody realizes that the adversary is as bad or worse off until he caves in.
* In other Ukraine War news, it appears that Russian forces in Ukraine have been using the Telegram app to obtain battlefield intelligence about the disposition of forces. Telegram is a messaging service with encryption capabilities, devised by two Russian brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov, about a decade ago. It has international reach, but it is the go-to communications / social media app for Russians.
Using Telegram for battlefield intelligence, however, is not a good thing. It appears Russian officers do not necessarily know where their troops are, one result being "friendly[?] fire" casualties. That led to reminiscences on Xitter of a well-known audio intercept from some time ago, involving a Russian soldier and a forward controller, callsign "RAMBO", desperately trying to get in touch with a misguided artillery battery, callsign "GRANIT":
QUOTE:
RS: WHERE THE F*** ARE YOU SHOOTING?! CEASE FIRE!
RB: This is RAMBO, confirming the friendly fire. F***!
RS: OUR GUYS ARE BEING SHELLED! DO YOU HEAR ME, B****?! THERE'S NONE OF US LEFT! F***!
RB: Our guys are getting hit! GRANIT, cease fire! This is RAMBO. I'm the signalman.
RS: GRANIT, I WILL DESTROY ALL OF YOU! F***!
RB: You destroyed a part of the frontline! ... Nothing works, no one hears us. Doing everything I can.
RS: WE GOT NO ONE LEFT, MOTHERF*****!
RB: GRANIT, cease fire!
RS: IF I COME BACK, I WILL SHOOT ALL OF YOU!
END_QUOTE
The audio clip is as hilarious as it is horrific, one Xwitter poster commenting when it was released: "Good job, GRANIT!" With the release of the article on the misuse of Telegram, another poster commented: "GRANIT, NOT AGAAAAAIN!:
In the meantime, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban is promising to veto new EU funding for the Ukraine War, but EU officials are not so concerned: if he does, they'll coordinate contributions from the individual states. Meanwhile, here in the USA, there's uncertain movement towards getting a budget through Congress. New House Speaker Mike Johnson appears willing to pass a budget without trying to cut it, but the MAGA representatives there may make trouble.
* Incidentally, the House MAGA are persisting in their attempts to find some pretext for impeaching Joe Biden. They haven't really found anything, but did manage to scrounge up a 2018 personal check for $200,000 USD from Joe's younger brother Jimmy, being a repayment for a loan. There's nothing problematic about the check, but the House MAGA want to make a big deal of it. They've gone so far as to subpoena Jimmy Biden and Joe's son Hunter.
It is likely the subpoenas will be ignored. Odds are not good that the House could pass a contempt vote, and even if they could, the DOJ wouldn't act on the congressional equivalent of a frivolous lawsuit. In the meantime the House Democrats, having had enough, investigated Comer and found that he had received a personal check for $200,000 USD from his brother, rather embarrassingly linked to a shell company. The House Democrats then subpoenaed Comer.
Will the House MAGA give up? Most of them can't tolerate being investigated -- but then again, they don't get clues easily. As Senator John "Gentle Giant" Fetterman said of the MAGA in Congress: "They're not sending their best."
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: This last week was quiet in a sense; there was plenty going on -- fighting in Ukraine and Gaza, Trump in court -- but nothing conclusive happened. The NEW YORK TIMES PITCHBOT continues to satirize the media's determination to tear down Joe Biden at every opportunity, but as of late the NYT-PB seems to never be as absurd as the media.
The media keeps spreading a false equivalence between Biden and Trump, playing up Biden's faults and glossing over Trump's worse faults. The results of special elections -- overwhelmingly tilted in favor of the Democrats -- are simply ignored or dismissed. It is very hard to believe that Donald Trump will be a credible presidential candidate in 2024. How can he run a campaign when he'll be in court much of the time? His public utterances have become increasingly demented -- and worse for the Republicans, they don't have anyone else that credible.
Of course, the sniping at Joe Biden focuses on his age, but it has also become increasingly obvious that the hidden issue is Vice President Kamala Harris. The MAGA Right does not, for obvious reasons -- think "gender" and "ethnicity" --- like the idea of Harris becoming the 47th US president. Myself, before she became VP I never thought of her as president, but now that her prospects for being so are much more evident, I don't have a problem with the idea. Certainly, as the saying currently goes: "The worst plausible Democratic candidate is much better than the best Republican candidate."
As for Joe Biden's position, the economic news continues to be good, though it seems to not be impressing the public, it appears because the media downplays it. Fuel prices have been dropping as of late, which should move the needle on public perceptions, and this last week Biden had a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at an estate near San Francisco, with agreements including re-establishment of the military hotline between the USA and China -- cut since Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in 2022 -- and measures to suppress the opioid epidemic. There was also agreeable talk about dealing with climate change and regulating artificial intelligence.
However, there was still a lot of distance between the two sides, with China not ruling out the reunification of China with Taiwan by force, and Biden telling reporters after the meeting that Xi is a "dictator" -- well, he is, though the Chinese denounced the remark as "extremely wrong and irresponsible." Of course, such comments from Biden complicate the troll narrative that he's a stooge for China, not that the trolls worry about the sense of the nonsense they talk.
This last week Japan got approval to buy 400 Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles from the USA, with initial deliveries in 2025. That was also sending a message to Xi. It appears that the Chinese have already complained about it.
* When I go on walks in the morning, I usually listen to ambient music on headphones. I've got headphones that can accommodate a micro-SD flash chip to store the tunes. It works well, but with the colder weather, I can't wear the headphones under a winter hat.
I tried using an old clip-style MP3 player with wired earbud headphones, but it seemed inconvenient. Maybe I should get one with Bluetooth capability? I already had two sets of sports-style Bluetooth earphones. What I wondered was if they still made MP3 players. I must've had like a dozen of them over the years, but I suspected that the smartphone had rendered them obsolete.
I checked on Amazon and, to my surprise, found out they were alive and well. I bought a DODOSOUL MP3 player with 128 GB flash memory for about $35 USD. It was physically solid, about the size of a very small phone. It didn't appear to have built-in memory, just a slot for a micro-SD card, which came with the product -- 128 GB being like an order of magnitude more than I needed. Music files can be loaded to the card from a PC, using a PC slot or USB adapter.
Getting it to work with my sports Bluetooth headphones wasn't particularly difficult. The only problem I found was that the menus were a little confusing. It took me a long time to figure out how to set music shuffle; the trick is that the menu for setting play mode was only accessible when the play screen for a tune was visible. Once set, the play screen displayed an icon for the operating mode.
It also has voice recorder and FM radio capability, not that I need them. I kind of wish it could play video downloads; the display is tiny, but it might be fun to watch cartoons on it. More significantly, it would be nice if it had a cheap camera in it; it's always nice to have another camera on hand.
More recently, I decided to get a multicolor lamp with USB audio capabilities for my gym room, and so I bought an "Aiscool" lamp / Bluetooth speaker with both micro-SD and USB storage music inputs, for about $25 USD. It looks like a big egg on a tripod base, with a touch cap and audio control buttons up front. Works fine too, in particular having easy touch controls that work predictably. Touch controls can be troublesome.
* Sigh, I'm always buying new gadgets, to end up taking some of the older ones to Goodwill for recycling. Incidentally, why gadgets from China tend to have funny names like "DODOSOUL" and "Aiscool" on Amazon.com. An article from SLATE.com by one Cleo Levin from 2020 commented:
QUOTE:
There are lots of brands that exist mainly or exclusively on Amazon, and it's difficult to track down the stories behind them. It's very common to see names made up of seemingly random combinations of letters, like Euymhod or WIHOLL. Most of these brands are based in China, and many are factory-direct, meaning that you are buying from the manufacturer. Pukemark [ED: Yes, that was one of the brand names!] which sells inexpensive, trendy clothing, is available through a third-party seller based in Hangzhou, China. Beyond the seller's Amazon profile, almost nothing about it exists on the web.
... THE NEW YORK TIMES investigated so-called "pseudo-brands" and found that the business model is to offer inexpensive options in categories where consumers don't have much brand loyalty. Since people are simply looking for the least expensive, highest-rated item, the brand name doesn't matter. For the brands that go through the trademarking process, using a more obscure name makes the process that much quicker.
END_QUOTE
The trick is that the funny names don't run into trademark collisions; they may be generated automatically, with a search then conducted to check for collisions. Of course, there are a lot of gadget-producers in China, and it seems they change their silly names fairly often and use several of them at one time -- possibly to keep a low profile, preventing Amazon from becoming concerned about and investigating their business practices. In any case, it does seem curious that producers may not want brand recognition.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: An essay in ECONOMIST.com reported, or seemed to report, that Russia's economy has not been hurt by Western sanctions. That didn't sound right to me, so I asked Microsoft Copilot: "Are sanctions hurting Russia's economy?" I got back this answer:
QUOTE:
Sanctions on Russia have indeed had significant impacts on its economy. Here are some key points:
In summary, while sanctions have inflicted pain on Russia's economy, they have not caused widespread economic collapse or halted Russia's aggression against Ukraine. The situation remains complex and multifaceted.
END_QUOTE
Later I got to wondering about the monetary sanctions, and asked MS Copilot about them:
QUOTE:
Yes, there are monetary sanctions imposed on Russia by various countries and international bodies. These sanctions aim to limit Russia's access to financial resources and have significant economic impacts. Here are some notable examples.
US Sanctions:
1: The US government has issued several sanctions measures against Russia. These include restrictions on Russian sovereign debt, blocking and addition of parties (including state-owned banks and influential Russians), and intelligence updates to the monetary system on Russian actions.
2: Sanctions were intensified in response to President Putin's recognition of the independence of the so-called Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) and Luhansk People's Republic in Ukraine (LNR)" and his request to deploy forces to those regions.
Sanctions By The EU & Other Western Nations:
1: The EU, US, UK, and Canada have frozen assets of Russia's central bank in their countries.
2: Major Russian banks have been removed from the international financial messaging system Swift, causing delays in payments for Russian oil and gas.
Ongoing Impact:
These sanctions have had both intended and unintended consequences. While they have put pressure on Russia's economy, there have also been claims that they helped Russia reduce dependence on foreign imports and boost domestic production. Russia has admitted that Western sanctions worked to throttle its economy but also stated it is on track to grow by up to 3% this year. [ED: The Russians lie a lot.]
Further economic sanctions continue to be placed against Russia, targeting defense companies, key individuals, and more. In summary, monetary sanctions on Russia are a complex and evolving situation, with implications for both Russia's economy and global relations.
END_QUOTE
This was a demonstration of GAI search at its best -- though for the second example, the search results didn't make much or any sense in a few cases and had to be edited a bit. Anyway, there's been much talk about its hazards, particularly a tendency to give wrong answers -- though as is generally pointed out, that's the breaks with any internet search scheme. The truth is that GAI search is a big step up: I ask it a specific question, it scours the internet and gives me about as good an answer as can be had.
It is, of course, necessary to give GAI search well-formed questions -- and the better-formed the question, in general the better the answer. If I can't get a good answer, that's a big hint that there isn't one available on the internet -- which is useful information in itself. It also references its answers, allowing me to follow up to specific online articles. It's getting smarter over time: early on, if I asked a too-picky question, it would just give me an answer on the general topic, but these days it gives me an answer on the general topic, and then apologizes for not being able to answer the exact question. It will keep getting smarter.
* On my morning walk, I make a loop past a filling station to check current fuel prices. On this frosty Sunday morning, I found out to my pleasure that fuel prices had dropped below $3.00 USD a gallon. This related to troll comments on Xitter, targeting Joe Biden, that inflation is out of control -- with a long stream of annoyed replies, for example pointing out that US inflation is, at 3.2%, now below the long-term average.
One FOX commenter got particular mockery for playing up a Thanksgiving turkey with a pricetag of over $90 USD. It was a specialty item from a high-end store, with replies describing more ordinary prices as in the $20:$30 USD range. To make matters worse for the commenter, that same turkey cost over $150 USD last year -- and Thanksgiving dinner was, overall, about 4.5% cheaper than last year.
As for fuel prices, on the basis of inflation, $3.00 per gallon in 2023 corresponds to about 45 cents per gallon in 1973. It was actually 39 cents per gallon, though it jumped to over 50 cents with the oil embargo the next year -- which was the first warning shot that the oil economy was becoming unstable. It should be noted that fuel prices will very likely increase once spring comes and people travel more, but nonetheless fuel prices are not that burdensome.
No sensibility stops the trolls, of course, in their determination to bring down Joe Biden. That is very hard to do, of course, given Donald Trump's deep legal problems and his only-too-obvious meltdown into paranoid dementia. In any case, I've noticed that people are less willing to argue with trolls these days, going straight to mockery instead. Trolls love to argue; they hate to be mocked.
* As discussed in an article from SCIENCENEWS.org ("Planets Without Stars Might Have Moons Suitable For Life" by Bas den Hond, 3 March 2023), about a hundred "rogue planets" -- planets not associated with a star -- are known. It might be thought such rogue planets would be permanently frozen, but now research shows that may not be true, thanks to tidal forces.
A study shows that the flexing of a moon in orbit around its parent planet could allow liquid water to exist on that moon, raising the possibility that life might arise on it. Astrophysicist Giulia Roccetti -- of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany -- and her colleagues created a computer simulation to reveal that, given the right orbit and atmosphere, some moons orbiting rogue planets can stay warm for over a billion years. Roccetti says:
QUOTE:
There might be many places in the universe where habitable conditions can be present. What we are looking for is places where these habitable conditions can be sustained for hundreds of millions, or billions, of years.
END_QUOTE
Rogue planets may have been formed on their own from gas and dust clouds, just like stars form, while others were torn from their parent star systems by some cosmic calamity. Computer simulations suggest that there may be as many of these free-floating planets as there are stars in the galaxy. Such orphaned planets might also have moons. In 2021, researchers proposed that these moons need not be cold and barren places.
Tidal forces stress a moon following an elliptical orbit, warming it up. A sufficiently thick, heat-trapping atmosphere, likely one dominated by carbon dioxide, might then keep the surface warm enough for water to remain liquid. However, over time the orbit will become more circular, with the gravitational force on the moon becoming more constant, and the heating will end.
Roccetti and her colleagues ran 8,000 computer simulations of a sunlike star with three Jupiter-sized planets. These simulations showed that planets that are ejected from their solar system will often fly off into space with their moons. The team then ran simulations of those moons, assumed to be the size of Earth, to see if there were heating and how long the heating would last.
Since an atmosphere would be required to retain heating. The researchers did simulations with three different atmospheric scenarios:
The moon of a rogue planet might still not be a very good place to find life, but Roccetti still wants to investigate the possibility: "There are many environments in our universe which are very different from what we have here on Earth, and it is important to investigate all of them."
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