MrG's Blog & Notes

* This is an archive of my own blog and online notes, with weekly entries collected by month. The current week in stand-alone format is available here. Feel free to CONTACT ME if so inclined.

[MON 06 JAN 25] THE WEEK THAT WAS 01

DAYLOG MON 30 DEC 24: As more or less a continuation of the Musk Rat's recent fiasco trying to derail government funding, there's a feud in progress between him -- along with other tech oligarchs in his camp -- and MAGA, over oligarchs hiring engineers on H-1B visas.

Industry needs these foreign engineers, but xenophobic MAGA of course hates them. The Musk Rat blew up and told MAGA to "F*** yourself in the face!" -- and then, indifferent to the irony, asked for more "positive, beautiful, or informative" content on Xitter.

It's not clear how much to read into this squabbling -- the RWNJs are angry all the time, so the anger is nothing new. It is true that tech oligarchs and MAGA aren't natural allies. The oligarchs clearly regard MAGA as ignorant bigots who are easily manipulated.

It seems that Trump is backing up the Musk Rat in this dispute. I doubt that it will cost him much with MAGA, since Trump can do no wrong for them, and they will cut him indefinite slack. The one thing that is clear is that the squabbling is undermining the Trump political agenda. We'll see how that plays out in the Senate's work on confirming Trump's bogus cabinet picks, and also in the current difficulties of House Speaker Mike Johnson. I'm particularly interested in seeing how Hakeem Jeffries plays his cards in that train wreck.

[LATER: Come the weekend, it turns out that Johnson survived the crisis, thanks to direct intervention by Trump -- barely winning the vote to become House Speaker. I'm not sure if that is good or bad news.]

* Anyway, it is not very surprising that Trump is backing up the Musk Rat, since he's the source of Trump's funding these days. However, it still seems surprisingly passive for Trump, who traditionally never concedes a thing. It seems like he's out of it.

I keep wondering if Trump will give up his old game of baiting reporters at press briefings. If he does give up, that tells me he's REALLY out of it. Incidentally, on saying this online, I had a poster tell me I was way off base to suggest Trump would stop baiting reporters.

I replied that he had me backwards -- I was just wondering what it would imply if he did. The poster just doubled down, so I blocked him. You can go away now. Similarly, when I commented that all the House Dems voted for Hakeem in the last Speaker fiasco and could be assumed to do it again in the upcoming train wreck, another poster insisted that the Dems wouldn't vote for Hakeem this time around. I replied that I couldn't think of why they wouldn't, not adding that it wasn't a big deal if they did or not, but the poster just doubled down. I blocked him, too.

In the online world, there are people who pick fights on flimsy pretexts or get into dogged arguments over trivia. I will tolerate people who are expressing a sensible opinion even if I don't agree with it -- though I may not reply to them -- but I'll block people who just want to argue. No loss. If I blocked 10,000 people on Bluesky, that would be a fraction of a percent of the total audience. I don't think I'm the only person online who blocks often these days, either.

DAYLOG TUE 31 DEC 24: Trump was making noises during the presidential campaign that he would end the Ukraine War on his first day in office. OK, Trump says a lot of things, and it's not clear which of them should be taken seriously.

However, Trump has long buddied up to Putin and has seemed to side with the Russians against Ukraine. About ten days ago, Putin was saying he was ready to talk to Trump about peace, which suggested that Putin might talk Trump into yanking US support from Ukraine. Since the US is Ukraine's biggest support -- on a per-nation basis, US aid doesn't go over half of the total -- that would be disastrous.

Now the Russian government has examined Trump's peace proposals & bluntly rejected them, Foreign Minister Lavrov saying "a cease-fire is a road to nowhere." Putin has said that peace talks would only begin if the government in Kyiv were replaced -- that is, Ukraine concedes defeat.

What happens with Trump relative to Ukraine is unclear, the signals being very mixed. Most Americans and most of Congress support Ukraine -- but it seems the real pivot point is that Putin is not making nice with Trump, and Trump is vindictive when he's snubbed. The Russians celebrated when Trump was elected in 2016, but they gradually found out he was low-functioning & inept, and was worthless to them. Putin no longer tries very hard to humor Trump.

In the meantime, Zelenskyy is buttering up Trump, & waving a Nobel Peace Prize under his nose. After all, Zelenskyy can say: "Hey Donald, Obama got the Nobel Prize, why not you?" That would get Trump's attention. Hey, if Trump can end the Ukraine War, I'd think concerned he deserves the Nobel Prize. It would make up for ... oh, like half of all the bad things he's done.

There's another question here: Why isn't Putin humoring peace talks as a stalling tactic? Maybe the answer is: Time is not on his side, & stalling doesn't help him. Earlier the thinking was that Russia wanted another "frozen conflict" to prepare to renew the war on better terms later. Now it more seems a pause in the war would allow Ukraine to recuperate and build up devastating quantities of drones and missiles.

Besides, Russia is economically running out of steam. General Budanov of HUR intelligence echoes many other sources in saying that Russia will be scraping the bottom of the barrel by late 2025. Even if Putin agreed to a ceasefire, Russia will still be under sanctions, and he will still be bearing the economic burden of occupation. War production in Ukraine and Allied nations is ramping up, and may well get to a tipping point sometime in 2025. It will get there faster if Trump doesn't cut Ukraine loose.

DAYLOG WED 01 JAN 25: As discussed in an article from SCIENCE:org ("Ice cores finger obscure Pacific volcano as cause of 19th century climate disaster" by Richard Stone, 30 dec 24), in 1831 there was a chilly summer that led to crop failures & famines in India and Japan.

Obviously the dismal summer was caused by a massive volcanic eruption whose effusions dimmed the Sun, but nobody knew what volcano was the culprit. Now a research team led by volcanologist William Hutchison of the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland has located the volcano in the Kurile Islands chain, in the far north of the Japanese archipelago. The eruption could be detected in ice corings from Greenland and Antarctica as sulfur isotopes and glassy particles of ash, but that in itself couldn't identify the volcano.

The give-away was that the volcanic ash from the corings was unusually low in potassium. That is characteristic of Japanese volcanoes. As it turned out, the chemical profile of ash from a volcano named "Zavaritskiy" on unihabited Sumushir Island, held by Russia, was a tidy match. The 1831 eruption was one of several at the end of the "Little Ice Age", a 500-year period of cooling. Volcanologists warn that another big eruption could take place at any time, & would be a global disaster.

* I saw a video of a Ukrainian "dragon drone" in action yesterday, and I was so startled at what I was seeing that I had to re-watch it to figure out what was going on. I'd heard about incendiary dragon drones, but I assumed they just carried thermite bombs. In the video, the drone was instead pouring out flame in torrents as it hovered over a target. I suspect it was spewing thermite -- aluminum & rust powders mix -- as a slurry in a burnable liquid, activated by a magnesium-flare igniter.

* In unusual architecture news, a new high-rise is being built in Tirana, the capital of Albania. The 71-meter (230-foot) tall "Puzzle Tirana Tower" is assembled from stylized house fronts in different orientations, with greenery in the spaces between. It's definitely thinking out of the box.

DAYLOG THU 02 JAN 25: As discussed in an article from BBC:com ("A genetic quirk protects some people from norovirus. Can vaccines help the rest of us?" by David Cox, 1 jan 25), the contagious "norovirus" is making the rounds, as it usually does in winter.

The "vomiting bug" -- it also causes diarrhea -- traditionally infects hundreds of millions of people, and is dangerous to the old and weakened. It is highly contagious, and also very tough, able to survive in hot or cold, and resistant to disinfectants.

"Challenge studies" in which volunteers are paid to be infected with norovirus show that about 1 in 5 people of European descent have a mutation in a gene called FUT2 This inactivates an enzyme and so protects them against GII-4. That's the most common of the 29 known strains of norovirus, accounting for more than half of all infections. The loss of the enzyme eliminates an antigen that norovirus uses to target cells. It is also known that those with blood type B resist norovirus infection.

This knowledge could help come up with antivirals to deal with the virus. However, norovirus is a tricky target; it is a single-strand RNA virus, and mutates rapidly. It tends to get around resistance, and also makes vaccine development troublesome. The push is to develop a vaccine that gives resistance to a range of variants, and hopefully to resist future variants. It's not going to happen soon, but researchers are hopeful of finding a way.

* There's a lot of trash going around online that the 2024 election was stolen, the claims supposedly coming from the Left. The FBI and the US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued a statement saying that such claims are being pushed by a troll campaign.

Color me not surprised. There's no prospect of a vote recount now, so the only purpose of the campaign is to discredit Democratic leadership, painting them as lazy and useless. As noted by others, when things go wrong for the GOP, the Dems get blamed. When things go wrong for the Dems, the Dems also get blamed -- the trolls make sure of it. Unfortunately, it's hard to tell the trolls from the Useful Tools that are going along with them.

DAYLOG FRI 03 JAN 25: Microsoft is now pushing "Copilot Plus" PCs, optimized for AI processing. MS introduced notebook computers with Cop+ features about half a year ago, and is now following them up with "brick"-style mini-desktop PCs.

These MS Cop+ PCs feature a "neural processing unit (NPU)" to give them enhanced AI capabilities. Trying to figure out exactly how an NPU works is not easy -- they clearly are built around an artificial neural network of some sort, but it's hard to find user-friendly descriptions. Software changes to Windows appear to include AI-style apps, such as an image creator, and AI enhancements to more traditional apps.

Cop+ PCs also have enhanced security features, though it seems that is only partly is due to the NPU -- better security hardware, maybe? Anyway, looks like I'll have to get a new PC sometime this year. Sigh, I'm already pretty up-to-date ... maybe somebody will offer a cheap NPU board.

AND SO ON: I found a video on YouTube titled: "Putin Already Lost", from the Icarus Project -- which examined the shaky economic basis of Putin's war in Ukraine. It's well known that Russia has been heavily dependent on oil production, but it's still surprising how deep the economic rot goes.

The focus on oil ended up fostering neglect for other sectors of Russia's economy, which not only narrowed the economic foundation of the state, but also made it much more dependent on imports. Such prosperity as there was trickled down from oil -- and once sanctions bit, the bubble began to collapse. It's hard to know what effect Ukrainian drone strikes have had on Russia's oil industry, but they can't have helped.

Add to this the reality that the once-rich oil fields of the Caucasus have been depleted, making Russia more dependent on Siberian oil -- which is much harder to extract, given the remoteness and harsh climate of Siberia. Along with that, hundreds of thousands of professionals have fled Russia because of the war, while the less skilled labor force is being depleted by the war's insatiable demand for cannon fodder.

Of course, the government is throwing ever more funds into war production -- which has limited effect in promoting overall economic growth. Finally, the government is pumping up an economic bubble with paying the troops, paying to medically support them when they're maimed, and paying death benefits to next of kin. Putin has a sovereign wealth fund piggybank to draw on, but it's being depleted. How much longer he can go on is not clear, but he can't go on indefinitely.

Putin is a thug on a grand scale, but nonetheless no more than a thug. To the extent that Russia ever looked prosperous on Putin's watch, it was superficial. Vast sums were accumulated by Putin and the "siloviki" -- the "men of force", "tough guys" with roots in the KGB and other gangsterish Soviet organizations -- with much of that "dirty money" circulating in the West, being used to pay trolls and in general subvert Western democracies. The sooner Putin leaves the stage, the sooner the rot stops spreading.

[MON 13 JAN 25] THE WEEK THAT WAS 02

DAYLOG MON 06 JAN 25: Brilliant political cartoonist Ann Telnaes -- one of the few women in that business -- came up with a cartoon of Jeff Bezos and other tech oligarch lords (Disney represented by Mickey Mouse) all making offerings to the Great Idol Trump.

WASHINGTON POST refused to publish it, even though the money being lavished on Trump by the tech oligarchs is not a secret -- with the editors making lame excuses as to why not. Telnaes quit, blasting the decision in a Substack commentary. Media mogul Mark Cuban, who supported Kamala in the presidential race, said that the tech oligarchs' generosity to Trump is all about AI. The different factions see their survival as dependent on not losing the AI race, and they fear government regulation. Cuban says:

QUOTE:

END_QUOTE

Cuban has an idea for getting Ann Telnaes a deal to publish her work exclusively on BlueSky. That hints at social media becoming the new patron of journalism. The 2024 election fiasco was driven by the collapse of legacy media and the domination of troll media. Are we going to see the emergence of new models to employ upright journalists now seeking work? Or will we be stuck with dreadful muddle? We'll see.

DAYLOG TUE 07 JAN 25: THEWARZONE:com ran an article ("Ukrainian Su-27 Flanker Pilot's Rare Account Of The Changing Air War" by Thomas Newdick, 3 jan 25) on the air war over Ukraine, focusing on a Ukrainian pilot with the callsign "Viking".

At the outset of the war, Viking flew his Sukhoi Su-27 "Flanker" heavy fighter in the air defense of Kyiv. Incidentally, Ukrainian Su-27s haven't got much press, most of the focus being on the smaller Mikoyan MiG-29. His Su-27 was old and was disadvantaged by older avionics.

Ukrainian combat aircraft are moved around regularly to protect them; fortunately, Soviet combat aircraft were designed to operate from rough airstrips, often having "farm tractor" landing gear. However, at least half of the Ukrainian 32 Su-27s have been lost -- though some others have been returned to service.

In any case, early on in the fighting, everything was "seat of the pants", doing whatever was immediately necessary to deal with the crisis. The antiquated avionics made it very difficult.

Early on, Ukrainian combat aircraft couldn't make strikes on Russian positions, because of Russian surface-to-air missiles (SAM). Western stand-off munitions changed that.

Viking spoke of the "incredible effectiveness" of the AGM-88 High Speed Anti[radar] Missile [HARM]. Rigging up the HARM to old Soviet jets was a challenge, but there are tools to do the job. The HARM & other Western munitions have to be controlled via a MILSTD 1760 databus. Rewiring the Su-27 was not practical, but stores pylons with a wireless link to the 1760 databus in a pylon were available. A tablet computer was mounted in the cockpit to link to the pylon over wireless. Of course, Viking had to be trained in how to use HARM in combat.

He also has used the GBU-38 JDAM 225-kilogram (500-pound) and the GBU-39 SDB 110-kilogram (250-pound) guided glide bombs. Viking likes the JDAM, but really likes the SDB. An Su-27 can carry 8 of them, 4 on a pylon, and it is accurate -- which is something of a puzzle, since by default the SDB is GPS-guided, and the Orcs jam GPS. It's working fine now, obviously something's changed, but nobody's saying what. An SDB has a penetrating nose and can punch through like 2 meters (6.6') of reinforced concrete -- or be programmed for airburst, to scatter fragments.

However, the Russians have their own glide bombs, with the biggest threat to Ukrainian troops these days being the heavy Russian KAB glide bombs. Ukrainian pilots need long-range missiles and modern avionics to pick off the glide-bomb carriers. F-16s are coming into service with Ukraine, if slowly. Reassuringly, Viking says Ukraine is not lacking planes or pilots for the time being.

DAYLOG WED 08 JAN 25: On Monday, Trump had a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago club -- which included the usual nonsense, such as attacks on Joe Biden and Jack Smith, along with complaints about the election despite the fact that he won, but he went farther.

Online influencer @AngryStaffer wrote: "Dear god, this presser is bats*** even for Trump." -- with Trump complaining about water-efficient showers, saying electric heaters make people itch, that wind turbines drive whales crazy, & proposing to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. This on top of Trump's comments about the "anschluss" of Canada, Greenland, and Panama. People are upset, but is he serious? Trump talked about grabbing Greenland years ago, and nothing came of it.

He sent Junior to Greenland, with Junior reporting back on the success of the trip -- but he didn't stay the day, and there's no evidence anyone in authority even had a conversation with him. Junior did come up with pictures of Icelanders in MAGA hats, with Junior claiming that Trump was welcome there. It turned out Junior had recruited a gang of homeless people with a bribe of a free meal to pose for the cameras. It's all gaslighting, & Trump rarely tries to follow through on any of it.

Trump may be simply trying -- successfully -- to divert attention from his imminent criminal sentencing. However, I'm thinking it's more that he is simply bonkers. Another observer of the Mar-a-Lago meeting called it "Caligula naming his horse a consul" crazy. It's obvious Trump has been in decline, the only question being: HOW FAST? It may be faster than I anticipated. Will he even be able to deliver his inaugural address? I think he will, but it may be bizarre. Exactly how this plays out, I do not know.

* One Elizbeth Cronise McLaughlin shot back on Bluesky at her followers who were pouring out nihilism saying: Nothing matters, we're doomed, yada yada. She said: "Every movement of the needle in the right direction counts."

Yeah -- I replied: "My read on the same is: Enough of the whining, crying, and freaking out. Yes, things are bad, but you losers are both boring and useless." I got some LIKEs out of that. I added that a lot of the whining is really trolling in disguise.

* I've wanted to have the ability to make fact-check queries in social-media postings, but found I can't do that. Then I thought; Or can I? Now I've taken to making queries to Google Gemini, cutting the response and pasting it into a JPG file, then posting it. It works neatly, though it's a bit laborious. Might I end up starting a trend? I'd like that, but the cut-&-paste scheme is vulnerable to faking. I would really like to be able to make a query as a posting.

DAYLOG THU 09 JAN 25: Wildfires have been ravaging the Los Angeles area, with the fires driven by drought and very high winds. Homes have been destroyed, including it seems the home of Trump-aligned actor James Woods.

When people commented on how climate change was driving the fire, Woods indignantly shot back that it was the fault of California's Democratic government. Indeed, Trump and all of MAGA seems to be playing this same silly tune. One MAGA troll that was going around was that the California government was badly underfunding fire control, with the government firing back that funding had been increased instead. The quarrel goes on. I'm trusting the word of CA:gov more than that of MAGA.

Somebody said on BlueSky that he had been expecting that, as climate change got worse, the Right would start to come around. He added, more or less, the reality was looking more like a fascist dictatorship that prosecuted climate-change researchers.

* In other pathetic news, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta announced that fact-checking on Facebook was being cut back, with loud howls of protest in response. That seemed a little over-wrought; Facebook has never been all that eager to deal with trolls. At the same time, the European Union has been getting annoyed with being trolled by Elon the Musk Rat, and is moving forward on investigating Xitter for its support of RWNJ subversion as violations of the EU DSA Act. Facebook is going to get the same scrutiny.

* The legacy media continues to be pathetic as well, now trolling Joe Biden for saying he wasn't sure he would have been able to complete a second term. Well DUH, everybody knew that. If he had to drop out, Kamala would have stepped up, & been an excellent president.

DAYLOG FRI 10 JAN 25: Yesterday was Jimmy Carter's funeral service, with ex-presidents and other dignitaries in attendance. There were some awkward scenes, including George W. Bush refusing to shake hands with Trump; GWB can't stand Trump -- too bad GWB would never really cross him.

Mike Pence's wife Karen similarly shrank back from the Trump family, no doubt recalling Trump's threats towards her husband. Barack Obama, in contrast, chatted cheerfully with Trump -- which led some MAGA to crow that Obama "kissed the ring". Ridiculous, of course. Obama is a very cool guy and would not be inclined to be uncool in public. Obama is also very self-assured, and would not have a problem humoring Trump. Joe Biden, however, scored oblique hits on Trump when Biden delivered the eulogy.

BIDEN: "Jimmy Carter's friendship taught me ... that strength of character is more than title or the power we hold. ... We have an obligation to give hate no safe harbor and to stand up to what my dad used to say is the greatest sin of all: the abuse of power." It's not clear that Trump even noticed.

* Today, Trump received sentencing from Judge Juan Merchan, with Merchan saying that, though Trump's conviction stands, no penalties would be imposed -- because, in so many words, the office of the presidency didn't allow for it. That's entirely disappointing, but under the circumstances the best that could be had. Imposing a deferred sentence would have been nice -- except that it seems unlikely it would be practical, & Trump seems unlikely to be functional or even around in 4 years.

* In response to a comment on BlueSky saying the economy didn't really seem to be the reason Trump won, something else was ... one "@visgrrl" suggested that the "something" appeared to be "racism & misogyny".

I replied: "The Tea Party, the ancestor of MAGA, got started on Obama's watch. Not a coincidence." I got a lot of LIKEs out of that -- but then somebody replied that was implying Obama was responsible for it. Anyone coming to topsy-turvy conclusions from what I wrote gets (did get) an instant block. I have other options besides blocks, however. I had a chat with someone who posts got ever less relevant, so I "rickrolled" her with the classic Rick Astley GIF. That ended it.

* AND SO ON: Trump is talking up a meeting with Putin. I got to thinking: What if Zelenskyy called up Trump and asked for all three to get together? Trump might go along -- Putin would be furious. We'll see what happens.

I'm also thinking of what surprises Joe Biden might pull in his last days in office. Maybe he'll quietly tell the government to set up parallel accounts on BlueSky? He couldn't stop them from posting to Xitter, Trump would rescind the order. Or maybe he'll transfer frozen Russian funds to allies so they can continue the loan program to Ukraine, backed by returns on Russian frozen funds, without Trump interference? I'm not sure that's legally possible -- and it may not actually be necessary.

* I finally got too sick of the trolls on BlueSky and got to wondering about what to do. To be sure, BlueSky is nowhere near as bad as Xitter, but it's still not very good -- it's like what Twitter used to before the Musk Rat snapped it up.

I thought of going back to Spoutible and re-established an account there, but I quickly remembered why I left it: it's a great place, but with very little activity. I figured I needed to rethink what I was doing on BlueSky, and came to some conclusions: I be very selective in who I follow, and stay out of the comments sections. I'll only go into my own comments section, and will be quick to mute or block people who do make replies -- mute if they're merely useless, block if they're toxic.

My major goal on BlueSky is to promote my writings, and I'm rethinking how to do that, too. It's a work in progress. Incidentally, I didn't delete my Spoutible account this time around; I'm thinking I still may have some good use for it. I just like the place too much.