Apex Upon Apex

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Consider a modern computer central processing unit or CPU. Many dozens, up to 60, highly purified chemical elements can come together to produce a CPU. The production of highly purified raw materials like chemical vapor deposition chemicals used in chip manufacture requires a stack of apex technologies to produce the purity and economics needed. The American Chemistry Council has an informative website articulating the role of chemistry in chip manufacture. To sustain the computer industry, mining companies need access to economical ore bodies for mineral extraction.

A few elements are particularly scarce. One such element is indium. Indium is 90 % available as a side stream of zinc refining. There is no US production. The main use is for the production of Indium-Tin-Oxide, ITO, as a transparent conductor for telephone touch screens. Indium market scarcity is based on the production rate of zinc, not the crustal abundance of indium. For this reason indium suffers from price inelasticity.

Why do I say a stack of apex technologies? The application of any given device or material depends the quality or purity as a specified input of each successive raw material. This goes all the way back to the mine. Purified intermediates from selective isolation of indium from the zinc process, selective isolation of indium oxide from an oxidation process, precise blending with tin oxide and coating on specialty glass. Oh yes, every manufacturer in the series must make a minimum profit too.

Every chemical manufacturing step requires careful processing to spec, satisfactory economics and the obligation to avoid patent infringement. Getting around a patent may carry economic penalties. A stable process means that process development is complete, yields maximized, purity optimized and attention to process drift is in place 24/7.

Below is a list of Indium, ITO or touch glass suppliers in the ITO market-

  • American Elements, Indium Tin Oxide is a solid solution of indium(III) oxide (In2O3) and tin(IV) oxide (SnO2) with unique properties as a transparent semiconductor material.
  • Umicore, Metals range from precious metals (Ag, Au, Pt, Pd, Rh, Ir, Ru) to base metals (Pb, Cu), minor metals (In, Te, Se, Sb, Sn, Bi)
  • Indium Corporation, variety of products that include solders and fluxes; brazes; thermal interface materials; sputtering targets; indium, gallium, germanium, and tin metals and inorganic compounds; and NanoFoil.
  • Keeling & Walker, Ltd. Keeling & Walker provides high purity tin oxides with a minimum purity of 99.99%. They also provide tin oxide with specific limits for individual trace elements. They offer high purity materials based on thermal oxidation, as well as from wet chemical processes.
  • Mitsui Mining & Smelting Co., Ltd., Primary in Zinc production and indium byproduct.
  • Samsung Corning Precision Material, The company includes products such as glass substrates for LCD
  • Touch International, From heavy duty outdoor terminals to delicate handheld medical devices, unique applications have unique touch, display, and cover lens requirements.

The supply lines for each chemical input to semiconductor manufacture are built to yield highly purified intermediates and products. To do this, a manufacturer must utilize their best efforts consistently. Having to rework a chemical product will result in 5-50% losses and extra plant time and material costs. Rework is never a good thing.

Quality control at the ppm to ppb level or below is never trivial. Use of the customer’s analytical methods verbatim is highly preferable or even mandatory. A very clean lab with ultra purified air and packed with highly sensitive instruments (ICP) and spec or analytical grade chemicals mas well as a well educated and trained staff to do the work is essential. Pulling samples cleanly from the process is an art unto its own and you best be ready. There are many learning curves to climb here.


The suppliers who ship directly to a semiconductor plant, i.e., a FAB, face purity specifications up to nine nines purity based on each of multiple contaminants. There are likely no lot tests signaling approval for received lots. A lot approval would require the FAB to do full test run in the plant at a frightful cost so they will not do it. This is a very scary place to be for a supplier. Shutting a plant down for weeks could happen as they investigate the cause of a disqualifying event. Somebody will have to pay.

Russian Economy & Military in Shambles Yet They Threaten Their NATO Neighbors

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Estonia is in the news recently. The Baltic nation is preparing for a possible invasion by Putin’s Russia. The fact that Russia has taken more than 1.5 million casualties in its invasion of Ukraine with no sign of withdrawal or meaningful military improvement likely means that he is prepared to take more casualties.

In a speech, Putin stated that Russia has no interest in war with Europe. However, Putin warns of his concern about Russian speakers in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania who he claims are oppressed. This transparent concern was used to justify the 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Hitler used it as well prior to his invasion of the Sudetenland. So Vlad, move the suffering Russian speakers back to Mother Russia. Easy peasy, right? God knows you’ve got plenty of real estate.

Despite Putin’s spiral diving military losses in Ukraine, Russia continues its hybrid hostilities in Eastern European, the Baltic and Scandinavian countries. Russian military tactics and its vast inventory of cold war surplus equipment has proven to be a paper tiger. It’s an open question as to the condition of his nuclear armaments that he rattles now and then. Nuclear weapons have a shelf life.

With all of the bullets and drones flying in Putin’s war, it’s a wonder that some projectile hasn’t found him. But then, evil men like Putin typically survive long enough to kill millions and trash their countries. It is a dark mark for humanity that the underlings of murderous dictators rarely summon the courage to assassinate these bastards.

Putin is upping the ante as he continues to menace the Baltic states and Poland. He is testing NATO to stress test their mutual defense pact. Will NATO really enter a shooting war with Russia if Estonia or Finland are invaded? Russia constantly probes the defenses of its neighbors with aircraft and and other underhanded incursions, just as they routinely did during the cold war. Russia is disadvantaged in the sense that it’s direct access to warm open ocean ports for commerce is hampered by geography. Sea access and ocean access are not equivalent.

Open question: Who the hell wants to conquer Russia? Let ’em have the frozen damned place. Putin has a bullet point in some of his speeches where he assures that their foes want “what they have”. Who on God’s green earth wants Russia? It belongs to the historically insular and paranoid Russians. One might argue that the Mongol Hordes did in the 1200’s. But they were more interested in tribute payments, not governance.

There is zero indication that the Russian people will ever rise up to dethrone Putin. The Russian people have been cowed into passivity under threat of imprisonment in the gulags since before Stalin’s brutal rule. Even the faintest suggestion of a revolutionary movement in Russia is genuinely dangerous. Putin will fall over dead in office. [Note to self: remember to build a brutal state security organ like the KGB/FSB with remote concentration camps for forced labor of prisoners when I overthrow a country]

What will Putin’s successor be like? Would they step into the pre-fabricated mafia structure built by Putin? The problem is that Putin’s rule is a personality-based mafia organization which relies on his demand of a cut of the profits from his oligarchs, some say 50 %, against the assurance of prison or defenestration to leverage payments. Transfer to the next leader will be in contention. Russia is firmly built around bribery, kickbacks and favoritism. A conversion to a capitalistic democracy as fantasized in the west would take decades if ever.

Putin himself is only part of the problem of succession. Without a doubt, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, will require approval in any transfer of power. Russia’s military is a constant concern to the FSB. They will require a big part in any power transfer. The gamesmanship will be epic.

America for International Readers

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Note: This essay is aimed at readers outside the USA who may not be up to speed on the present political mechanics of how US government operates. Fellow Americans, for you this is old news.

The entire world is aware that America is under the control of a wealthy property developer with a focus on golf resorts and gold leaf. His malignant world view is on a long held transactional footing. He may not be suffering from an actual mental illness, but he certainly has multiple, overlapping personality disorders. He is widely viewed as a dangerous a$$hole, but in America this is not a legal or practical barrier to elected office.

President Trump is a walking, talking monument to “Greed is Good”. The man is intelligent, but he does have negative personality traits that have been amplified and sustained by his wealth and election as President. The man has over time developed a reputation for having an uncanny knack for business deals and the accumulation of hotels and resorts, all aggrevated by his successful reality TV show. Afterall, he is a billionaire, isn’t he?

That wealth facilitates power should not surprise anyone. It exists everywhere. In America children are taught that anyone can grow up to be president. You just need to study hard and achieve. Anything is possible, it is often said. In reality, this is only approximately impossible, not completely.

America is a stratified society with the ultra-rich occupying the top social layer with the dirt poor and criminals at the bottom. In between are layers of the highly educated and the poorly educated. Upward mobility across the layers is sometimes possible, but transition to the millionaire and billionaire layers is difficult and highly reliant on luck. Your own good luck may depend on the bad luck of others.

As a group, Americans are inclined to believe that the wealthy are imbued with superior abilities but manage to discount the effect of luck. A large bank balance is enough math needed to measure a person’s overall merit. Whether or not wealth was achieved without having committed hard or soft crimes or keeping your sanity is not a metric. To many voters, merit stands on wealth accumulated where wealth stands for cash, credit or real estate.

The judgement of a person’s merit is neither inherently right nor wrong since such determination is subjective. A person’s lifetime merit is the sum of their actions and intentions and is inherently qualitative. However, if the operating policy of your life is transactional like our President’s, then the barrier to offensive behavior and ill-gotten gains is much diminished. A charitable person may claim that there is goodness in everyone, but if “goodness” only rests on the avoidance of a heinous crime as with our President, then I beg to differ. In his 2016 campaign Trump admitted in public that he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue in New York City and get away with it. This was a revelation about him, but nobody took it seriously.

In America, there is the common view that wealthy people are deserving of our fascination for having achieved their wealth. Add this to the support of certain religious groups and you can win elections. In the early years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a concentrated effort was made to recruit religious groups, namely southern conservative protestant denominations, into the fold of the Republican Party. Decades of harping about abortion and moral majorities was a political strategy that diminished liberal candidates and brought throngs of single-issue voters to vote Republican. It worked and continues to be a strength of the GOP.

Today the hot-button issue is not so much abortion as the lurking specter of socialism and even communism. Socialism is presently found in the form of local fire and police departments, utilities, schools, Medicare, social security and more. Take away any of these services from conservatives and the howling will begin. I suppose they are against your socialism, but not theirs.

At present, the United States is functionally unable to control President Trump. The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party or GOP, has a majority of votes in the House, the Senate, owns the Presidency and has a majority of life-time justices in the Supreme Court. Trump is party leader and is supposed to be balanced by the Supreme Court, two houses of Congress. These are the much praised “checks and balances”. The US Constitution was designed to prevent a chief executive from becoming a dictator. Regrettably the Constitution did not anticipate the present circumstance and is inadequate to provide a remedy. The Republican members of the Congress are deathly afraid of being subjected to a primary vote where candidates are selected for the later vote directly into Congress. They have refused to apply their checks and balances, so here we are.

Besides the constitutional branches of government is the so-called 4th Estate, the news media. Historically, newspapers unofficially held some amount of influence over politicians by virtue of fear of bad publicity. Until Trump came along, this fear was quite influential. His habit of continuous complaining about the media led to the formation of media businesses based on his every utterance. This has greatly diminished the influence of the 4th estate.

If you intend on starting a new democratic nation, pay attention to the manner in which the US is self-immolating on the global scale. Note how a malevolent political party took control of the government by simply getting elected. The conditions under which a Trump-like person is elected along with his party being in total control of Congress calls for an official body that can physically remove him from office if Congress finally gets around to voting him out in case he refuses to relinquish power. Electing a malevolent president supported by an ineffectual congress and cabinet is a dangerous condition requiring preplanning. America has to endure this situation by law.

The seemingly ideal condition of citizens electing candidate as president by a simple majority is hobbled by the electoral college. This college consists of electors designated by each state whose number is based on population and who unanimously cast their votes for a presidential candidate. This was put in place at the demand of southern slave states whose populations were greatly increased by slave populations. The result was a system that compensated slave states with an increased number of votes for the white population.

The US is locked into a terrible condition where a minority of neoliberal ideologues who, from in the shadows of Trump, are forcing their malignant theories of capitalism on the nation. No one voted for a libertarian society. Malignant because it seeks to transfer much more wealth and power to a small caste of oligarchs at the expense of the majority of the public.

Look at the rise of Elon Musk. He controls a space program, a media empire called “X”, an electric vehicle manufacturing enterprise, a large orbital telecommunications constellation and has the ear of Trump. He recently exercised his own foreign policy by shutting down access to his telecom satellites to Ukraine, thereby crippling Ukraine’s access to satellite telecommunications and much to the detriment of Ukraine’s war effort.

US President Trump must be reined in for many reasons, but here I refer to his support of Putin. Offering to back off sanctions on Russian oil exports, Trump has thus given aid to the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Trump’s strange affinity for Putin remains unexplained.

Submission to the Orange Genius

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It has been said that one of the purposes of government is to protect ourselves from each other. From fellow citizens, that is, and more than just brutish criminality. There are subtleties here that stand in the shadows behind criminal and civil law. The very meaning of freedom is at stake.

Like untold millions I assumed freedom simply meant the ability to travel, speak and associate with whom I please without government interference. But that is just the dust jacket of the book. The inner chapters have a particular inflection, building upon the superficial blurbs on the dust jacket. In this sense freedom includes the unfettered ability, i.e. the bigger freedom, for individuals and companies to separate the citizenry from their wealth either in ways yet to be banned or by good old fashioned fraud and theft.

The term “unfettered ability” includes the staging by the government to clear the regulatory path for the extraction of wealth from the public. This occurs through deregulation of business practices that were meant to protect the public from unfair leverage, theft or legally grey activity. Businesses would prefer customers be lined up with credit card in hand like pigs to slaughter for efficient processing. After all, don’t spreadsheet toting MBA-in-finance views on efficiency trump our desires for a good and decent life? Isn’t economic efficiency the apex of capitalistic society? Shouldn’t we be grateful that wealth funnels to the right people? After all, they know best. Just ask them.

Another aspect of deregulation is the removal of constraints on the recovery of natural resources and any lasting, though necessary, environmental insult that may result. The word recovery is interesting because it helps to normalize the private extraction and ownership of Earth’s non-renewable resources. The word recovery sounds almost heroic or herculean in describing the grasping of someone’s missing property that has been heretofore inaccessible.

While fabulous wealth is waiting below earth’s surface for the industrious to pull out and be rewarded for their risk and efforts, the other issue is how to balance the reward to miners and drillers with the inevitable loss of wilderness and exhaustion of resources. The global economy is heavily reliant on mineral resources- BTW petroleum is a mineral- that props up the house of cards supporting our modern lives. Our economies are dependent on stacks of apex technologies built upon apex technologies. Apex technologies that required a goodly bit of finesse to achieve may have weak points built in that were unavoidable.

A weak point may be a single raw material supplier or the price of a scarce specialty material on the international market. What was previously a trade secret for a manufacturer may have been superseded by the granting of a patent to another company who was unaware of the previous secret use but with patent in hand is in no mood to forge a sweetheart agreement. The collapse of an apex technology that supports other apex technologies can bring subsequent technologies into hard times.

How is it that millions of voters can justify to themselves their pandering and submissive behavior towards Trump. Witness the slavish honoring of Trump with their apparel and rote parroting of his insane rhetorical yammering. This is not unique in history but is telling of the effectiveness of Australian Rupert Murdoch’s media empire outside his own country.

Given the submissive behavior expected in the prevalent Christian religion towards the Holy Trinity, are MAGA people predisposed to bowing in prostration before their orange crusader? There appears to be more devotional thinking than analytical thinking among the MAGA hordes. The MAGA love for Trump grossly resembles religious devotion. It’s just a theory. If it dissatisfies the reader, come up with your own.

Post Script

An interesting contradiction is with MAGA American support of Zionism. American Zionists defend the reclamation of the Levant by Jewish Zionists, but seem unwilling to validate similar action by Native Americans. Indians do not figure in Christian eschatology in the manner Israel does. If Indians were said to have a role in the second-coming of Christ, I’m sure the situation around an Indian homeland would be quite different.

The Unseen Lever

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1.1       Consider the stick.

Without a doubt, shortly after the first early human picked up a stick, the value of leveraging, nudging or hitting has been appreciated.  In the hands of a sentient being, most advantageously one with an opposable thumb, a stick or tree branch can be brought down on the skull of an animal or foe to provide food or protection. A sharp stick is just one jab away from being a spear. It can be used to poke and prod campfires and dig for roots or burrowing animals. Not all uses of a stick are in the realm of hunting or combat.

With the barest minimum of manipulation, the end of a stick can be wedged under a heavy object. With upward force on the other end of the stick, the object may be moved. By bringing the middle part of the stick down on a fulcrum, further downward motion may be used to raise the object.

A stick contains in its structure the means for which mechanical advantage of leverage may be taken. What is missing is only the motivation to do so.

1.2       Tools

The advance of human civilization is substantially the story of mankind’s ability to master the material world around them. The development of agriculture and the domestication of animals allowed for permanent settlements and away from the nomadic life.  The development of settlements led to the beginning of specialty occupations by people and food surplus. Food surplus allowed for time and resources for specialists to develop tools to increase labor efficiency.

Many tools have the elements of simple machines[1]. Simple machines are devices used singly or in combination to turn one kind of motion into another. For example, a screw converts rotational motion into translational motion. A wedge turns translational motion into diverging motion on an object as with the splitting of wood. A shovel uses the spade of the shovel as a wedge and the handle as a lever to raise soil from the ground. Likewise with an adze or hoe.

More important than motion conversion is the matter of mechanical advantage. Force can be amplified by the use of one or more machine elements.

In the world of bulk matter, material objects are subject to alteration by nature or by human engineering. Rock at the surface of the earth is prone to chemical weathering and mechanical attrition by the forces of nature.  In the hands of engineers, rock may be fractured, cut, or milled into desired shapes.  Some kinds of rock are easier to work than others. Limestone or sandstone, by virtue of their cementitious nature, is easier to hammer or chisel into desirable shapes than many harder igneous or metamorphic forms of rock.

Throughout recorded history and by observation of archeological evidence dated well before recorded history began, humans have been exploiting material objects around them. This advantage taken of materials has involved physical and chemical alteration. 

1.3       Energy

Living organisms have been external exploiting energy from the very beginning of life. The second-by-second machination of life requires that molecular mechanisms be in place to assemble or disassemble molecules. This is done by making and breaking chemical bonds. Forming a chemical bond- the arrangement of charges by which molecules are held together- commonly releases energy into the surroundings. This is called exothermicity. The opposite process, breaking a chemical bond, commonly absorbs energy from the surrounding environment. This is called endothermicity.

Mankind has been exploiting energy from the earliest times simply by eating food and using the derived energy to hunt, gather, farm, reproduce, and make fire. Food energy is capable of some very dramatic things. Before steam power, food energy used by animals or humans along with the clever use of elementary machines built the pyramids of Egypt and Meso-America. Food energy powered the construction of Stonehenge, the Great Wall of China, Rome and architecture all over the world.

Food energy had its limits, however. For humans, food energy could not light up the darkness of night, make steam, smelt iron or calcine clay into pottery.

Fire is an energy releasing phenomenon that has long been exploited by nature in the form of forest and prairie fires. Although initially highly destructive, fires are useful for the rapid recycling of life giving minerals back to the soil. The loss of prairie grass or forest canopy by fire provides opportunity for new and diverse species to invade and thrive.   

Fire in the hands of early human beings allowed them to stay warm and see in the dark of night. Fire allowed early humans to handle and direct a large magnitude of concentrated energy. But unlike the kinetic energy of a swinging hammer or a sharp axe, fire gave man thermal energy. Thermal or heat energy from fire was fundamentally different in its utility to mankind.

A knife or a hammer could cut or smash matter and a lever could move it. A sharp axe could fell a tree or an enemy. But fire, like the metabolism of food, could change the fundamental nature of materials. Fire gave mankind the ability to advance from altering the shape or size of a material to changing its composition. Foods could be made more palatable by cooking. Clay could be fired to yield stronger and more durable objects. Eventually, humans would discover that fire could be used to reduce metal ores to purified metal. From the hearths of industrious people came the bronze and iron ages.

On the darker side villages could be burnt to the ground and witches could be dispatched by burning at the stake. Bronze and iron would find use in armaments. With benefits come inevitable hazards.

1.4 Mechanization

One particular metric of mankind’s progress over the millennia has been the mechanization of our use of tools. Tools of the past were made of stone, wood or metal and were operated by the input of muscle energy.  Tools are contrivances that enhance the user’s ability to apply force to objects in order to do something useful.  A rock can be lifted to store potential energy and then be brought down on a prey animal for a kinetic kill or to expose the brain or bone marrow for rich nutrients. The bow or atlatl was used to accelerate flesh penetrating kinetic energy weapons in hunting or in battle. Some early weapons allowed for the storage of potential energy for release at the command of the user. The bow or catapult are examples of devices that allowed for the accumulation and short term storage of potential energy.

Over time, the screw, the lever & fulcrum, the pulley, numerous gearing mechanisms, the water wheel, the wagon wheel, springs, grinding wheels, and other devices were developed to store or aid in the application of force to a work piece or material. 

Until the invention of gunpowder, the application of energy was largely in the form of fire or through the agency of an axe, bow, hammer or spear.  Fire could be used to heat, melt, calcine, or cook materials in a reliable way. Fire was a phenomenon that could be used to apply intense thermal energy to objects. Fire was an early chemical tool.

The advance of technology is often the concentration or intensification of force. The spear or the arrow are tools that concentrate force by providing a cutting edge with a relatively small surface area.

1.5 AI

The invention of the transistor has evolved to into complex semiconductor devices converting computers from mere word processing engines to devices that can simulate human analysis and cognition. Presently, we are only part way through this step change. Just like the invention of the bow and arrow, the spear and gunpowder allows humans to apply lethal force at a distance, what will artificially intelligent (AI) machines allow us to do from a safe distance? Within 50 years or so of the discovery of compositions capable of deflagration i.e., what we now call gunpowder, it was weaponized for the purposes of war. We see the latest step change now with autonomous “smart” weapons like drones and robots in the Putin-Ukraine war. Can we resist the temptation to use AI not for more efficient inhumanity but for the betterment of mankind? I wish I could be more positive, but restraint seems unlikely.

[1] Simple machines have been listed as the lever, wheel and axel, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and the screw.

The Wicked Mr. Trump’s UN Speech

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Today’s address to the general assembly of the United Nations by the wicked Mr. Trump is yet another lurch in the psychotic breakdown of foreign policy of the United States of America. Trump’s speech further reinforces the spectacle of America’s moral collapse and declining status in the international community.

The adjective wicked is a bit antiquated but nicely fits for Trump. The word evil has supernatural connotations that might actually confer superhuman abilities which would flatter him and thereby be undeserved.

The current version of the Republican Party has led America into a disaster the likes of which are heretofore unseen. Trump has driven away our closest allies. He has deeply offended and threatened Canada, arguably the nicest country in the world. The citizens who voted for Trump own this festering boil and should be made to make amends. Idiots are elected by idiots.

Perhaps the USA could be excused for the first election of Trump. But to elect him twice and then make a show of failing to restrain him in his misdeeds is unforgivable. We have lost allies and trading partners in the international community and many of those states have already forged agreements and trade relationships leaving the US behind. There will be no return to past alliances.

It is as if the USA does not understand what a great position we have held since the end of WWII. American influence is already disappearing on many fronts.

Even when the time comes that Trump is out of the picture, the EU, trading partners and NATO will remain skeptical due to our 4-year election cycle that can abruptly reverse policies. America’s flip-flopping of policy with the election cycle has long been a source of consternation for the EU.

TRUMP IS A DISASTER AND MUST BE PHYSICALLY REMOVED FROM OFFICE TO STOP THIS DAMAGE TO OUR NATION. THERE IS NO INDICATION THAT HE WILL VOLUNTARILY VACATE THE OFFICE WHEN THAT TIME COMES. AN AGENCY OR COMMITTEE WITH THE AUTHORITY TO REMOVE TRUMP MUST BE DEVISED TO ACT UNDER THE FORCE OF LAW TO DO THIS OUTSIDE OF HIS ADMINISTRATIVE CONTROL.

Trump, Vance, the cabinet, Speaker Johnson and the congressional MAGA Republican caucus are burrowed deeply beneath the skin of government and must be voted out for the continuity of our democratic republic.

The majority of voting Americans who oppose Trump are obligated by law to respect the election schedule imposed by the constitution in regard to elected office holders. While we follow the law in this regard, the congressional majority has declined to apply the built in checks and balances allowed by the constitution, thereby allowing Trump’s actions.

So far Trump opponents have been peaceful in their protests and general conduct. We have declined to storm government buildings, breaking in doors, injuring police officers and using bear spray in protest. It is because we, the loyal opposition, understand that it would be wrong.

How to be patriotic to Trump’s America? That’s a tough question. My tattered patriotism remains with pre-2016 America.

Insurrection by Proxy

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Below is a quotation reported in The Hill of the “swearing in” of attendees at the recent 2026 Dallas hootenanny of the GOP. Trump asked the attendees to take the following oath-

“I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. I don’t care. I am going to go out and I am going to get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November third or we are going to vote before that.”

Nobody would write a movie script with a scene having the above swearing in conducted by a president. It’s too corny for adult audiences. It would result in a movie rated 7 tomatoes out of a hundred on the Rotten Tomato scale. Yet the president of the USA delivered this order to commit voter fraud in the Nov. 2026 midterm election.

The American president is verbally directing citizens to commit voter fraud. This is an attack on the central pillar of American democracy. It is meant to disqualify winning Democratic members of congress by direct injection of hand waving uncertainty into the very voting process itself. This could lead to the congress disqualifying elections where the GOP led congress could cherry pick districts to disqualify and at a pace that would lengthen the duration of GOP dominance while investigation drags on.

This is tantamount to the theft of public voting rights and is a hybrid attack on America itself. If another country did this, we would consider it as an act of hostility.

According to the Cornell Law School website, treason is defined as-

Treason is the betrayal of one’s own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the State or materially aiding its enemies. According to the United States Constitution, Article III, Section 3, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.” Furthermore, 18 U.S.C § 2381, states that a person guilty of treason against the United States “shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.” 

Trump’s speech gives instructions that if executed as requested, will result in the ruling political party having oversight over the remedy to alleged election fraud. How much more absurd does this have to get before there is a large scale uprising? The 2016-2016 decade of Trump has been a disaster extending well past our borders. The whole global political and financial operating system is fragmenting and rebuilding to the exclusion of the USA.

I doubt that in the current political climate a court, especially SCOTUS, would actually find Trump guilty of treason. Whether or not Trump’s oath constitutes “betrayal” is a legal grey area and grey areas are beachheads for the MAGA lawfare invasion.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission. Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

What used to be reverently referred to as the 4th Estate is being taken over by America’s splotchy clique of oligarchs. The acquisition of CNN and CBS by an IT Oligarch’s clan and Fox News by an Australian monopolist have gone far to turn the news policies of electronic media from liberal to Trump loving broadcasters.

The conversion of the meaning of the words liberal or liberal media to a common epithet began decades ago in the Reagan years. During the Reagan years, the Republican Party joined up with conservative protestant evangelical congregations to spread anger and dismay. It has worked brilliantly. Evangelical pastors, especially those on television, began to blend theology with conservative politics in their weekly performances.

Hellfire, brimstone and abortion combine naturally like eggs, bacon and home fries stimulating the end-times theology of Baptist church goers. Citizens normally absent from the political scene latched onto abortion as their single issue and voted accordingly, irrespective of what else may come of their candidate choices.

From inside my online world, I’m left to conclude that the Democratic party and the so-called liberal media have consistently FAILED to meet expectations as a unified political force in opposition to the GOP. This, multiplied by voters who vote against their best interests under the hypnotic blathering of Trump and his stable of idiots, has led to the accelerated demise of America’s global hegemony.

The Democratic party has failed to produce a platform that lights a fire under voters and candidates. Republicans know how to get elected but can’t seem to govern. Democrats show greater skill in governance but have trouble getting elected. The Republican electoral playbook is wide open for study. They’re good at persuasion and mobilizing voters. Yes, they’re liars, but this is a war for the progressive America we recently allowed to slip from between our fingers. More Democrats should be removing their gloves in this cage fight for America.

Columnar Rock Layers at Yellowstone

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Just a quick posting of a wonderful rock formation in Yellowstone National Park. Note the two layers of columnar lava rock. Recall the Devil’s Causeway in Northern Ireland or Devil’s Tower a couple of hundred miles to the east of Yellowstone in Wyoming. That Devil was a hard working demon.

Slow solidification and shrinkage of the cooling lava flows from earlier vulcanism led to this columnar structure. There is a pull-off across the road next to what must be the upper layer where the photo was taken. I skipped across the road to get a closer look. After 5 minutes I noticed the sign warning not to go next to the formation due to the danger of falling rock. At least there wasn’t a bison standing there as well.

Image credit: Arnold Ziffel.

The Expanding World of Bentonite

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In researching a newspaper article on the expansive clay bentonite, I’m reminded of the rich geochemistry and mineralogy of silicates and aluminates. A visit to the Wikipedia page for silicates reveals a taste of the variety of silicate structures. The clays under discussion here are of the sheet silicates also characterized as phyllosilicates. When the word ‘bentonite’ is used, it is understood to mean a clay with at least 70 % montmorillonite.

Image: Link. The platy nature of clays.

The two clays mentioned here are layered structures comprised of silicate tetrahedra (T) and aluminate octahedra (O). Kaolinite would then be classed as a TO bi-layered structure and montmorillonite is classed as a TOT tri-layered structure. The figure above shows the platy, stacked nature of the phyllosilicates.

Image: Link. Excellent graphics from the European Geosciences Union.

Silicate minerals with a single, isolated SiO44- groups are called orthosilicates. These SiO44- units can be joined at the vertices to form single and double chains, rings, sheets and 3-D networks as in quartz. In the case of chains, etc., the silicon atoms are bridged with oxygen atoms.

Presently I am writing a piece about the sciency aspects of bentonite, a clay responsible for expansive soil. A local McBurger restaurant has closed temporarily due to structural problems caused by expansive soil which is symptomatic in the region. For geographical context we are in north central Colorado between Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Denver, Colorado. The presence of troublesome bentonite-containing expansive soils in the area is well known. In fact, there are many bentonite mines in Wyoming, one with milling operations in Casper, WY.

According to the Wyoming Mining Association, Wyoming has 70 % of the world’s and 93 % of the USA’s known bentonite deposits.


Graphic from the Wyoming Mining Association.
Graphic from the Wyoming Mining Association.

Bentonite can be harmful to roads and building foundations but also serves as an important raw material. It is used primarily in drilling muds, cat litter, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, animal feeds and other applications.

Image: Link. Creative Commons..
DO – 10.1186/1476-511X-13-153
ImaLink. Nieto, S.; Toro, N.; Robles, P.; Gálvez, E.; Gallegos, S.; Jeldres, R.I. Flocculation of Clay-Based Tailings: Differences of Kaolin and Sodium Montmorillonite in Salt Medium. Materials 2022, 15, 1156. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma15031156ge:

The class of expansive clays relevant here are the smectites. Bentonite is a smectite and has mineral composition rich in the montmorillonite member of the smectite group. In short, montmorillonite can attract waters of hydration to a great extent depending on the cation sub-type of the montmorillonite. The sub-types include Na+, K+, Ca++, Mg++, Fe++ counter-ions. A common cation in montmorillonite is sodium cation. The high water solubility of sodium salts in general allows for it’s replacement by other cations.

The montmorillonite unit structure consists of 3 layers similar to the stacking of an Oreo cookie. The inside cream layer consists of a sheet of aluminate octahedra. The two sandwiching cookie layers are sheets of silicate tetrahedra. The net effect is that the internal surplus negative charge carries through to the exterior surface of the sandwich. This charge attracts water layers and cations that will coordinate to the cookie surface to balance the charge. This attraction to cations and water leads to expansion of the unit structure the mineral and therefore swelling of the bulk material.

Kaolinite is comprised of bi-layers of a tetrahedral silicate sheet intimately bound to an aluminate sheet with no intervening layer of hydrates. The direct stacking of the kaolinite plates absent the water layer physically prevents water from migrating between plates and leading to swelling. Kaolinite is not an expansive clay.

Image: Cambridge Core (Paywall) , a ball and stick drawing of a Kaolinite silicate layer on top of a octahedral aluminate layer.

The pottery clay familiar to most of us is comprised mostly of kaolinite. While not a smectite, kaolinite (above) has just a single tetrahedral silicate layer connected to an octahedral aluminate layer to make a flat platy structure.

Image: Link. Nieto, S.; Toro, N.; Robles, P.; Gálvez, E.; Gallegos, S.; Jeldres, R.I. Flocculation of Clay-Based Tailings: Differences of Kaolin and Sodium Montmorillonite in Salt Medium. Materials 2022, 15, 1156. https://doi.org/10.3390/ma15031156

What’s Worse- Authoritarianism or Socialism?

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Over the decades I’ve listened patiently to conservatives, especially the elected GOP types, spout off about liberal proposals or programs as being “socialism.” The very word carries a strong revulsion in them, enough to cause right wingers and even some centrists to recoil in horror. In common usage, the word is almost spat out of their mouths with the same abhorrence that one might vocalize in reference to a Old Nick himself. The mere utterance of the word should be enough to demolish liberal proposals like affordable healthcare or Pre-K programs.

My station in life has been in the field of chemistry, not psychology, so I am hardly qualified to clinically diagnose what psychology lies behind this vigorous and frequent epithet. Despite the mountain of clinical ignorance I reside under, I can offer a few observations in the not-so-subtle form of questions.

  • What event led to the huge corrosive and emotional investment many conservatives have with socialism?
  • How is it that I can read comments from conservatives in social media or network news wherein acute criticism is levied on socialism, but such criticism is not expressed on authoritarianism? Are they OK with authoritarianism or just unwilling to invite comparison?
  • Do conservatives still believe that socialism automatically means Soviet-style socialism? Didn’t the Soviets prove to the world that Soviet socialism doesn’t work? Many of us were paying attention to this event, weren’t you?
  • Could it actually be that conservatives view socialists as freeloaders wanting to suckle on the generous American teat?

Without food, shelter or skills, the world is a dangerous place for those not born into wealth or without a record of good luck. The sort of dilute socialism in practice in the USA since FDR brought us a social safety net has had many positive effects. The overall effect is that it has reduced some of the harshness of life for a great many.

Perhaps the beef that the moneyed class has with liberal democracy is that they are prevented from accumulating gilded-age wealth by every means possible? They want absolute control of markets and labor. The role of government is to arrange consumers for easy pickings, like fish in a barrel. In the biological world, unlimited growth is called cancer. The religion of shareholder value sets the pace for endless growth, despite the mathematical absurdity of it.

Greed is like a penis- it has no brain. It only knows that it wants more.

The 2nd Amendment-banging ultra-right wingers in camouflage britches have long been eager to explain that they were prepping for oppression by a tyrannical government. Well boys, the tyrannical government is here here! Now whatcha gonna do?