* This is an archive of my own online blog and notes, with weekly entries collected by month.
* THE WEEK THAT WAS: The Ukraine War sputters on, with Russia performing a massive missile and drone attack on Ukraine this week, with Ukraine retaliating with a barrage against Russia. There's a lot of defeatism going around, saying the prospects for Ukraine are dismal, that Russia remains strong and cannot be beaten.
It is typical of wars that the defenders, in feeling the pain they suffer, fails to realize just how bad off the aggressors are until they collapse. An article from BUSINESSINSIDER.com ("Russia's Economy Is Paralyzed, Yale Researchers Say" by Jason Ma, 26 December 2023) spotlighted a commentary by Yale Professors Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian that blew holes through the myth of Russian strength -- saying that Western sanctions and the mass exodus of multinational companies from Russia that followed have inflicted great pain on Russia's economy.
Sonnenfeld and Tian wrote: "We cannot fall into the trap of thinking that all is good for Putin, and we cannot jettison effective measures to pressure him." Putin's expropriation of Western assets in Russia as they exited the country may have seemed decisive, but the assets are hollow and almost worthless, doing nothing to halt Russia's tailspin. They pointed to other difficulties:
Yes, the Russians have figured out ways to bypass sanctions, but they are improvisations and inefficient; they cannot change the dismal fundamentals of the Russian war economy. Sonnenfeld and Tian wrote:
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Russia, which never supplied any finished goods -- industrial or consumer -- to the global economy, is paralyzed. It is not remotely an economic superpower, with virtually all of its raw materials easily substituted from elsewhere. The war machine is driven only by the cannibalization of now state-controlled enterprises.
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Add to this list the reality that, among the other consequences of the Ukraine War that Vladimir Putin didn't think of at the outset, Russia is now under attack by Ukrainian drones and missiles, as well as a mysterious but clearly active sabotage campaign. How much damage they're doing is hard to say, but they're at the very least forcing Putin to allocate military resources to defending Russia instead of attacking Ukraine.
* In my efforts to learn Japanese, I've taken to downloading anime video clips with Japanese dialog from YouTube and attempting to decode them. I'm having some success, but occasionally I get stumped. I thought maybe I could find someplace to ask questions, and first tried "r/LearnJapanese" on Reddit forums. I wasn't really expecting much from it -- Reddit's never worked very well for me in the past. I figured it was still worth a try, so I posted a question.
It didn't work well this time either. One of the issues is that, whenever first posting to a new forum, there is a high probability that the replies will be unfriendly. There are people on forums who, for whatever reasons, go far out of their way to troll newcomers, so I make sure I know how to block posters before I make my first post. As I expected, I got a pompous, condescending, and useless reply; I blocked the poster right away, thinking: "I knew it!". Beyond that, I didn't get any useful response, and it didn't seem like there was a lot of activity on that subreddit anyway. Having taken a chance on Reddit one last time and finding, as I more or less expected, it didn't work, I deleted my Reddit account, so I wouldn't make the same mistake again.
There things sat for some days -- then I found out about language exchanges, in which people from different countries ask about each other's language. That seemed like a great idea, and on checking found out that there were a number of popular language exchanges available. I probed them and soon found out they weren't such a good idea, either. The problem is that they aren't really set up for general chat with a group, instead they are set up for establishing penpal-like relationships between posters. I wasn't comfortable with that idea at all, it sounded awkward. Worse, I found online comments that language exchanges are often trolled by scammers and the like. It wasn't going to work.
What to do? I finally wondered if there were Japanese language forums online besides Reddit, so I looked around and found a number of them. However, on examination they were all "cobwebsites", the most recent postings being several years old, no ongoing activity at all. It seems that between Reddit and Facebook, there's no interest in forums these days.
So, I'm outa luck, if maybe not forever. I've got used to using MS Copilot on Bing, and found it actually can give some insightful answers on use of Japanese. It turned out to be like having a personal tutor, able to sometimes answer even tricky question -- as long as they're properly phrased. Yeah, sometimes it gets things wrong, but that's more the exception than the norm.
One of these days it seems plausible there will be an AI chat system focused entirely on the Japanese language -- as part of a global network of AI chat systems, each focused on a specialized topic. Alas, although that's a plausible future, it's not going to happen for years.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Now that it's 2024, the USA is stumbling towards the national election in November -- which is not looking good for Donald Trump, or the GOP in general. His lunatic behavior on the campaign trail almost defies description, and tales of his conduct as president now circulating are hard, if not impossible, to believe. Back in July, Miles Taylor -- a Department of Homeland Security staffer during Trump's time in office who published a highly visible anonymous critique of Trump in 2018 -- said in a podcast:
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This fifty-page memo that we would normally give to any other president about what his options are is something Trump literally can't read. The man doesn't read. We've gotta boil this down into a one-pager in his voice.
And so I had to write this incandescently stupid memo called something like: AFGHANISTAN, HOW TO PUT AMERICA FIRST AND WIN. And then bullet by bullet, I summed up this highly classified memo into Trump's sort of bombastic language because it was the only way he was gonna understand.
I mean, I literally said in there: "You know, if we leave Afghanistan too fast, the terrorists will call us losers. But if we wanna be seen as winners, we need to make sure the Afghan forces have the strength to push back against these criminals." I mean, it was that dumb, and that's how you had to talk to him.
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This last week was the 3rd anniversary of the 6JAN21 Capitol riot, with reports being recycled of how Trump watched the riot on TV with satisfaction, and would do nothing to call it off. When an aide told him Vice President Mike Pence was in danger, Trump said: "So what?" Will anyone with at least half a brain vote for Trump in November? [ED: No, but as it turned out, there were too many people who had less than half a brain.]
* A study from Imperial College London (ICL) suggests that the USA will see job growth from taking action against climate change, but some US states will see more advantage than others. Lead author Judy Jingwei Xie -- from the Center for Environmental Policy and the Grantham Institute at ICL, says:
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Overall, our analysis is good news: recent policies such as the Inflation Reduction Act [the Biden Administration's economic package that includes green technology funding] will lead to consistent job growth. There are some states currently very reliant on fossil fuel production that could lose out, but there are tools available for them to get ahead of the problem and take advantage of the situation to turn themselves into leaders of the clean energy revolution.
By boosting retraining opportunities for the existing workforce and training young people in low-carbon technologies, traditional coal-producing states like Wyoming could put themselves at the forefront. The new American Climate Corps can provide these opportunities if it manages to deliver the targeted compensatory support to communities in need.
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The analysis was based on the "Regional Energy Development System (ReEDS)" energy system model developed and maintained by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The researchers generated 70 future energy system scenarios and then modeled of how thy would impact employment across states based on their energy profile and demographics.
The wide range of scenarios included the "US Long-Term Strategy", which aims for a 100% reduction of electricity system carbon emissions by 2035 and showed consistently positive job growth. The research team made the model publicly available.
* As discussed in a press release from the University of Innsbruck, Austria ("Built Into the Genome of the Microbes, Scientists Uncover Over 30,000 Hidden Viruses", 10 June 2023), it is well known that the human genome contains the broken genes of viruses that infected humans in the distant past. Obviously, other organisms have such "fossil" genes embedded in them, and Innsbruck researchers decided to go hunting for them in eukaryotic microorganisms -- that is, single-celled microorganisms with a nucleus, as opposed to bacteria that don't have a nucleus.
Metagenomic research demands a lot of computing power to sort through large numbers of genomes and search for viral genomes embedded in them. Using a high-performance computing cluster known as "Leo" at Innsbruck, the researchers identified more than 30,000 new viruses embedded within the DNA of unicellular organisms. They found that up to 10% of microbial DNA can consist of built-in viruses.
Dr. Christopher Bellas, Marie-Sophie Plakolb, and Professor Ruben Sommaruga from the Department of Ecology were carrying out a study of unicellular microbes when they stumbled upon this extraordinary finding. While many of these "provirus" genomes were broken by mutations, many were in principle able to give rise to active viruses under the right circumstances. These active viruses were not necessarily harmful to the host cell, and could in some cases help defend the cell, infecting attacking microorganisms.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: In late-breaking news, Russia has its Amazon.com clone, named "Wildberries" -- with the huge Wildberries distribution center in St. Petersburg burning to the ground in a massive fire. Rumors are circulating about what happened, one conjecture being that the warehouse was supplying Russian forces in Ukraine under contract, and so saboteurs targeted it. Apparently, the reality was that Russian press gangs raided the warehouse to grab workers and send them to Ukraine, so the workers set fires to evade capture.
It appears that response from fire-fighters was weak at best, possibly because too many of them have been sent to Ukraine, but nobody was hurt. Things are not going well in Russia; along with the disastrous war, sanctions are proving economically brutal. It is hard to see how the war can be sustained, but Vladimir Putin cannot and will not quit. Tyrants are like that.
* As discussed in an article from REUTERS.com ("Six Planets Found In Synchronized Orbit May Help Solve Cosmic Puzzle" by Will Dunham, 29 November 2023), in recent decades there have been hundreds of discoveries of planets in distant star systems. The most common type observed is two to three times the diameter of Earth but smaller than Neptune, and orbiting closer to its parent stars than our Solar System's innermost planet Mercury does to the Sun.
Of course, there are no "sub-Neptunes" in the Solar System, leaving many questions about their nature. However, astronomers found six of them in synchronized orbits around a star about 20% smaller in mass than the Sun, providing clues about them. Their synchronization is due to "orbital resonance", in which the gravitational couplings of the planets end up making their orbits interdependent.
University of Chicago astronomer Rafael Luque, the research lead, says: "What these sub-Neptunes are made of is an active topic of research in the field since there are multiple combinations of rock, water and atmospheric composition that can reproduce the bulk properties -- mass, radius and density -- of the planets."
The newly discovered sub-Neptunes range from 1.9 to 2.9 times Earth's diameter. All appear to possess a large atmosphere. They and their star are located around 100 light-years from Earth. The innermost planet takes about nine days to orbit the star, while the outermost planet takes about 54 days. The planets orbit the star between 6% and 20% of the distance between Earth and the Sun -- though since the star is dimmer than the Sun, they don't get as hot as they would in the Solar System.
Whether they are habitable or not remains unknown. An Earth-like planet would certainly be uninhabitable, but the sub-Neptunes may have more "options" for habitability. The researchers want to inspect them with the James Webb Space Telescope to obtain more data.
* I've been following the Ukraine War closely, and one thing that finally started annoying me was renderings of Ukrainian names. Is it "Volodymyr Zelensky?" Or "Zelenskiy"? Or "Zelenskyy"? So I decided to learn how to convert Cyrillic text to roman text.
That turned out to be trickier than I thought it would be. One of the issues is that Cyrillic alphabets vary from language to language more than roman alphabets do. True, there's a lot of variation in roman alphabets, but it's generally with modifiers like accents and umlauts and such, the basic letters remaining the same. Not so with Cyrillic: Russian and Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabets have 33 characters each, but only 29 characters are common to both, with each alphabet having their own four characters. One Ukrainian character that looks like "I" with two dots on top has become a national symbol, scribbled by the resistance in Russian-occupied areas as a symbol of defiance.
To add to the confusion, the conversions of characters can vary between the two sets, and there are a good number of different romanization schemes, for example French conversion not being exactly the same as British conversion. After a good deal of muddling around, I settled on a passport conversion scheme for Russian and the US Board of Geographical Names (BGN) scheme for Ukrainian. So now I've got a set of flashcards I can review, and am moving along nicely. By the scheme I selected, the name is "Zelenskyy". I doubt there is any one perfectly satisfactory scheme of conversion, but at least I can be consistent.
Incidentally, transcription from the Japanese "kana" phonetic character sets is totally straightforward, there being no ambiguity in how kana characters are converted into roman characters. The conversion scheme was popularized by a 19th-century American missionary in Japan named James Curtis Hepburn, though it was actually a committee effort. The Japanese later tried to establish their own conversion scheme -- but it didn't catch on, since the Hepburn scheme was as good as could be had. Partly that's because Japanese phonetics are surprisingly close to English phonetics, which is not so true for Russian or Ukrainian. Japanese is even closer to Spanish, having soft "Rs".
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: This last week, the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) pulled off a major coup against Russia by using killer drones to attack the oil terminal at Ust-Luga, on the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland, to the west of Saint Petersburg. The fires raged for days. According to Ukrainian sources: "The Ust-Luga oil terminal in the Leningrad region is a crucial target for the enemy. They process fuel there, which, among other things, is supplied to the Russian military."
Ukraine is stepping up their attacks on strategic targets in Russia, with reports of a near-simultaneous attack on the Russian city of Tula -- the target apparently being the Shcheglovsky Val plant, which produces the Pantsir air defense system. There are also reports that a Russian corvette of the Black Sea Fleet was crippled or sunk by sea drones in late December.
The SSU claims to have k-drones with a range of 1500 kilometers (930 miles). The warheads appear to be on the small side, about 3 or 4 kilograms (6.6 to 8.8 pounds), about the size of an 81-millimeter mortar bomb. Presumably the warheads have a combined-effects capability, with incendiary as well as blast effects. I'm thinking that an attack on the Russian Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome, where Russian military satellites are launched, is in order. It's within range, and rocket fuel tanks would make a very good target.
Given far-reaching k-drones, Russia is a target-rich environment, and impossible to effectively defend. From the time the war started, I was thinking k-drones would prove a very useful weapon, Yemen's Houthis having inflicted severe pain on Saudi Arabia with their Iranian-supplied k-drones and cruise missiles. It just took longer to work up the capability than I expected.
* Kongsberg of Norway has obtained a contract from the International Fund for Ukraine for the delivery of CORTEX Typhon counter-UAS (drone) defensive systems. CORTEX Typhon includes a Kongsberg Remote Weapon System (RWS) turret, integrated with a sensor system from Teledyne FLIR. Apparently the turrets are to be mounted on Dingo 2 4WD light combat vehicles.
The turret appears to be based on the RWS4, with a 12.7-millimeter machine gun, and with at least daylight and infrared imagers, possibly laser rangefinder or lidar. It almost certainly has automatic target acquisition, tracking, and engagement. What makes this interesting is that, these days, combat vehicles need drone defenses -- could we see Ukrainian Bradleys fitted with CORTEX Typhon or the like?
* As discussed in an article from SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.com ("The American Climate Corps Wants You" by Kate Yoder, 28 September 2023), some months back, the Biden Administration authorized the creation of the "American Climate Corps (ACC)" via an executive order. The program would hire 20,000 young people in its first year, putting them to work installing wind and solar projects, making homes more energy-efficient, and restoring ecosystems like coastal wetlands to protect towns from flooding.
The idea of the ACC has been around from the start of the Biden Administration. It was originally to be called the "Civilian Climate Corps", a nod to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC)", created in 1933 to help deal with the Great Depression. It hired young people, housed in work camps run by the US Army. The CCC was responsible for building hundreds of parks, as well as many hiking trails and lodges found across the country today.
Establishing the ACC required a little fancy political footwork; it was killed off at one time, then revived. The ACC is not merely intended to implement environmental measures, but -- as the executive order put it -- "ensure more young people have access to the skills-based training necessary for good-paying careers" in clean energy and climate resilience efforts. There are ideas to link it with AmeriCorps, the national service program, and leverage several smaller climate corps initiatives that states have launched in California, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, and Washington.
The program is still being worked up. The public is very supportive, with 84% of Americans supporting the idea in polling conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication in 2022. With the goal of hiring 20,000 a year, the new program is much smaller than many activists had hoped. The original CCC employed 300,000 men in just its first three months; women were excluded until Eleanor Roosevelt's "She-She-She" camps opened in 1934. Some progressives, like House Member Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, were hoping Climate Corps could employ 1.5 million people over five years. If the initial program goes well, it could be scaled up.
BACK_TO_TOP* THE WEEK THAT WAS: Ukrainian General Kyrylo Budanov, boss of the HUR military intelligence service, is always interesting to listen to. back in September. Christopher Miller of the FINANCIAL TIMES of the UK spoke with him in Kyiv, with Miller's report published on 20 January 2024.
Budanov, 38, has masterminded Ukraine's covert war against Russia, becoming one of the most public figures in the struggle. He is best known for conducting attacks behind enemy lines in Russian-occupied territory and Russia itself. In his department's latest feats, it flew attack drones as far as Saint Petersburg, striking an oil terminal, and targeted a gunpowder factory and an oil depot in the Bryansk region, just north of the Ukrainian border.
Budanov rarely says much about the missions, of course preferring to keep Moscow and the rest of the world guessing about the HUR's reach and abilities. There are tales some of Ukraine's backers are nervous about the attacks, but they seem exaggerated, Budanov being unconcerned: "We do not foresee any drastic changes in the near future. Everything we have done, we will continue to do."
The general admits that the progress of the war through 2023 was not everything desired, but it wasn't a failure, either: "To say that everything is fine is not true. To say that there is a catastrophe is also not true." If Ukraine failed to make much headway, Russia is going nowhere; Budanov says Ukraine has already proven that "the whole legend of [Russian] power is a soap bubble".
A former spetsnaz (special forces) soldier who fought in the Donbas in 2014, when the fighting with Russia began, Budanov has himself taken part in secret missions, and been wounded multiple times. He was appointed to run the HUR by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2020. His covert operations have invigorated the agency, which long played second fiddle to Ukraine's much bigger domestic security service, the SBU. He has attained cult status among Ukrainians and their foreign allies, becoming a popular figure on social media.
The Russians have repeatedly attempted to assassinate him, though he says the efforts were "nothing special". The closest he came to injury was in 2019, when a bomb placed beneath his vehicle exploded prematurely, failing to do him injury. His wife Marianna Budanova was less fortunate when she was intentionally poisoned with heavy metals in November 2023, along with several HUR officers. Budanov says: "She's getting treatment, she feels better now."
Budanov didn't want to comment on Ukraine's current military operations, saying such questions should be referred to the army. He did say that further mobilization of troops is an absolute necessity. Zelenskyy has said his army chiefs asked him to mobilize about 400,000 to 500,000 new soldiers to replace those killed or wounded, and to rest those involved in the most intense fighting.
He also commented on Russian arms production, saying Russia was expending more weapons and munitions than it can make, while struggling with quality control: "This is precisely what explains Russia's search for weapons in other countries." He says that North Korea has become Russia's biggest arms supplier: "They did transfer a significant amount of artillery ammunition. This allowed Russia to breathe a little. Without their help, the situation would have been catastrophic." However, the reliance on outside help is a sign of Russian desperation: "This has always been considered beneath them, it's an indignity."
Similarly, Russia is losing troops faster than it can recruit them, with the result that mercenary groups, such as Wagner, have become more important. Budanov is not sure that Wagner's boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was really killed in a plane crash in 2023: "I'm not saying that he's not dead or that he's dead. I'm saying that there's not a single piece of evidence that he's dead."
Another favorite Budanov meme is the health of Putin. He often has claimed that the Russian president has cancer, and also says that many public appearances of Putin are actually doubles. Budenov says it's obvious: "It's not that difficult." Indeed, some of the doubles are easily recognized, one with a weaker chin having been tagged long ago, though some are harder to identify. One giveaway about the doubles is that when Putin confers with foreign leaders, he does so sitting far from them on a long table, presumably to ward off infection -- and hinting that his immune system has been depressed, possibly by chemotherapy. Videos of Putin mixing with people suggest fake Putins.
Finally, did Budanov have any predictions for the course of war in 2024? He replied: "No. I hope that our success will be greater than theirs." -- and then took his leave.
* I've mentioned Clay Bennett, cartoonist for the CHATTANOOGA TIMES FREE PRESS, in earlier columns. One of his new cartoons had an evangelical in a MAGA hat and a TRUMP sweatshirt, kneeling and praying: "Thank you for sending us Donald Trump."
A voice comes up from the ground: "You're welcome." I had to comment that evangelicals will live to regret backing Trump. Mainstream churches have been shrinking, evangelical churches have been thriving. Their thriving days are coming to an end.
In other Trump-related news, reports are that Trump doctor Ronny Jackson -- a notoriously loud-mouthed and particularly nasty MAGA troll -- allowed the pharmacy in the White House to dispense controlled drugs like they were candy to anyone who wanted them, running up huge charges. It seems this was uncovered by a Pentagon investigation. It's the kind of thing that I find hard to believe, except that the unbelievable was normal for the Trump Administration. I'll still have to wait on details. In the meantime, Jackson has been nicknamed "Candyman".
There are still a lot of worries about Trump winning in November, but people are finding that idea ever harder to take seriously. Trump is decaying physically, mentally, legally, financially, and politically. He has no future, and neither do the people who still follow him. Unfortunately, for the moment we're still stuck with Trump. We just have to be patient a while longer. [ED: Turned out we were stuck with him for well longer. However, what was said here is still, over the longer run, not wrong.]
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