The Energy Information Administration (EIA) is a primary source of data relating to global petroleum and distillate use. It follows production, transport and prices. In addition to supplying data, they provide some interpretation of the global picture. There is so much BS circulating about fuel costs that a credible source of information is welcome.
Oil tankers come in two varieties- clean and dirty. A clean tanker hauls low-sulfur distillates. A dirty tanker hauls crude oil. Since the invasion of Ukraine, tanker shipments from Russia to the west have fallen off and longer voyage shipments have increased. This has increased the cost of transport and floating storage of petroleum and distillates. In the time between February 2022 and November 2022, Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) rates from the Middle East to the US Gulf Coast (USGC) have more than tripled. The rates from USGC to Rotterdam have increased from $8.00 to more than $27.00 per metric ton. Rates of shipments on Suezmax ships have also tripled. Dirty tanker rates from Russian ports in the Baltic and Black Sea have gone up due to increased insurance rates. Also, add to all of this the increased cost of bunker fuel for longer voyages.
Shipments of LPG (propane) have been delayed by long waiting times for passage through the Panama Canal. Congestion at the Neopanamax locks has led to increased scarcity of Very Large Gas Carriers (VLGC). Propane is both a fuel and an industrial feedstock. Propane is dehydrogenated to propylene and used for the production of polypropylene. Propane is also a fuel whose demand is highly seasonal with greatest demand in the winter months. VLGCs in the Middle East are drawn out of the area by better rates in the US, creating scarcity there.
Reuters: Tesla announced that they will begin mass producing the Cybertruck, their ugly monstrosity of a pickup, by the end of 2023. Oh joy. Maybe with any luck it will go the way of the Edsel. I condemn the vehicle solely on the basis of styling. It looks like something from a 1970’s low budget made for TV SciFi movie.
DW News: That fetid little pouch mouse leader of North Korea fired more than a dozen missiles across the Northern Limit Line in a single day as well as 100 rounds of artillery shells, rattling the nerves of South Korea and Japan. There is speculation that the scurvy little pustule intends to test another nuclear weapon soon. The guy seems anxious for a fight. One day he’ll get it.
Reuters: I just don’t understand Israeli politics. Netanyahu is close to winning a majority of seats in the Knesset in Israel’s 5th election in 4 years. I thought he was shown to be corrupt and thrown out of power.
Reuters: In the trial of the January 6 incident, the Oath Keepers defendant said “I felt it was like a Bastille time in history,” referring to the raid on the Bastille in Paris that led to the French revolution. I don’t think that these guys understand just what “tyrannical” really means. Thinking of the milquetoast Biden as a tyrannical leader seems, well, stupid.
Today we hear about lithium batteries ad nauseum. Everyone is anxious to achieve a bright battery-powered electric future for happy motoring. Mineral exploration has revealed a few new sources of lithium and mines are increasing production. Battery factories are ramping up and R&D keeps turning out tweaks in battery technology. Many are betting on or prophesying the eventual phase-out of hydrocarbon fueled motor vehicles.
Lithium is quite scarce and is the 25th most abundant element on earth with about the same crustal abundance as chlorine although this may vary with the source. For the most part, lithium is fairly widely dispersed in the earth’s crust but it is subject to concentration by hydrothermal transport, forming evaporite deposits or briny ground water. Lithium is also a component of the mineral spodumene which can be found in pegmatites within some host formation. An uncommonly rich site was at the Foote Company Mine in the Kings Mountain Mining District of North Carolina. This operation produced lithium carbonate, Li2CO3. This is a common finished product because it can be removed from a solution of lithium chloride by treatment with sodium carbonate to precipitate the poorly soluble lithium carbonate.
This light metal has many chemical uses apart from batteries. For instance, organolithium reagents are a vital part of the chemical industry clocking in at about $1 billion per year in sales. Organolithium reagents are an indispensable part of organic synthesis. Switching to a reagent with a different metal usually does not work well, giving poor results or the wrong reactivity.
Today we’re seeing organolithium prices rise dramatically with little expectation that it will ever come back and no clue of how it plays out in the future. If a few select lithium reagents, e.g., LiAlH4 or n-butyllithium, go off the market, it will be a bad day for the organic synthetic industry as well as for chemical R&D in general. It is an unexpected consequence of the switch to reduced carbon EVs.
Vlad Putin has been ominously reminding us that he will not rule out the use of nuclear weapons if the Russian state is under existential threat, whatever that means. Maybe now is a good time to review just a few basics of nuclear weapons and what they do.
There are a large number of internet sites that go into great detail about the dark art and history of nuclear weapons. No need to duplicate that here. I’ll just give my take on a few points.
Remember the Morse curve from freshman chemistry? It describes the potential energy versus distance of two atoms at the scale of chemical bonds. The left side of the blue curve shows how steeply the repulsive energy potential rises (exponentially) with diminishing internuclear distance. By contrast, the attractive potential on the right of the blue curve flattens out with increasing interatomic distances. Keep this in mind.
When a fissile uranium-235 nucleus absorbs a neutron, the nucleus momentarily becomes unstable uranium-236. A stable nucleus has repulsive Coulomb forces between nucleons that are balanced at close proximity by the attractive strong nuclear force. The liquid drop model is useful for visualizing a nucleus as it fissions. On absorption of a neutron the uranium nucleus will distort to an elongated dumbbell shape leading to an imbalance of attractive and repulsive forces between nucleons. This can take the nucleus past the distance where the strong nuclear force attraction can hold it together. The strong nuclear force holding together nuclear particles (nucleons) falls off much faster with distance than does the Coulombic repulsion of protons. At the instant the nucleus separates into adjacent fragments, the two highly positively charged nuclei find themselves in very close proximity and are now only subject to net repulsive force. From the left side of the Morse Curve we can see that the repulsive force is exceedingly high in this moment. The highly repulsive potential energy is converted to kinetic energy at the moment the nucleus splits. The nuclear fragments fly apart at high velocity along with neutrons and dump thermal energy into the surrounding bulk material. But the kinetic energy of the fragments is not the only source of energy output.
Nuclear fission fragments are released in a highly excited state. Apart from their kinetic energy, nuclei have different energy levels with differing stabilities. A nucleus can undergo energy transitions from one state to another. These higher energy levels are called nuclear isomers and their stability can be expressed in terms of half-life. As fission fragments are formed they shed energy in the form of alpha, beta, gamma, and neutron emissions. Neutrinos are left out of this discussion for simplicity. As nuclei decay, they get closer to a stable ground state. Unstable nuclear fission products will decay in their characteristic ways, contributing to the overall energy release.
One challenge to weapons designers is to cause as many nuclei as possible to fission before the weapon undergoes “hydrodynamic disassembly” over the first 1 microsecond or less. After ignition the rapidly expanding plasma of the bomb core increases in volume and the probability of neutron collisions with nuclei diminishes rapidly. When a uranium or plutonium nucleus fissions, 2 or 3 neutrons are emitted which go on to strike other nuclei and induce fission in them. The cascading generations result in an avalanche of fissions. One of the ways to ensure that enough generations of fissions occur with enough neutrons flying about inside the supercritical assembly is to surround the core with neutron reflecting material. Ways of doing this can be found elsewhere.
One more thing about the strong nuclear force. This quote is from the Wikipedia entry for the strong interaction–
“The residual strong force is thus a minor residuum of the strong force that binds quarks together into protons and neutrons. This same force is much weaker between neutrons and protons, because it is mostly neutralized within them, in the same way that electromagnetic forces between neutral atoms (van der Waals forces) are much weaker than the electromagnetic forces that hold electrons in association with the nucleus, forming the atoms.“
A nuclear weapon produces a near instantaneous point source of energy release. These bombs can be detonated at or below ground or water level, or they can be set off in the atmosphere or space. The choice of where to do it depends on the intended effects. Subsurface bursts consume much of the explosive energy in moving soil or water which provides some radiation shielding to the surrounding area. Furthermore, bursts in contact with soil or water, especially when the fireball contacts the soil, tend to produce more fallout than air bursts. Air bursts deliver EMP, radiation and blast effects to a wider area, where “radiation” refers to neutrons, gamma and longer wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Thermal and blast effects produce considerable prompt destruction in the area surrounding the blast. As an approximate point source of energy, the intensity of the radiant energy falls off as some inverse square law. On an encouraging note, this means that radiation exposure falls off rapidly with distance. Distance is your friend.
There are numerous variations on the nuclear weapons theme. In the early cold war days, so called A-Bombs and H-Bombs were in the news. H-Bombs are also referred to as “hydrogen bombs or thermonuclear weapons.” An A-bomb, A for Atomic, was a basic implosion-type fission explosive and it was the typically the least powerful of the two. The H-Bomb was a nuclear fusion explosive that was triggered by a fission “primary.” That is, a fission trigger would be used to generate x-rays that would be “focused” onto fusion fuel, the “secondary,” which would initiate a runaway nuclear fusion explosion. The explosive yield of these bombs is much higher and can deliver a devastating blast to a larger area. Over time, the efficiency and compactness of these bombs has been greatly optimized.
The fusion explosive element was lithium-6 deuteride. The lithium atom would absorb a neutron, become unstable and decay into a helium-4 nucleus and a tritium (helium-3) nucleus. On a side note, in grad school I attended a seminar by Dieter Seebach from ETH, Zurich, who was talking about mechanistic work they’d done with lithium enolate complexes. He mentioned in passing that at that time, the mid-80’s, they had to be careful with stoichiometry because the commercial lithium that was available was often depleted of lithium-6 which was accumulated by the government for diversion to weapons. It was an unexpected brush with the cold war.
The main deleterious effect of radiation on human tissue lies in the formation of ions and radical pairs along the path of the penetrating radiation. The molecules of life are dissociated into ion pairs or radicals which may or may not collapse back to the original molecules. Given the amount of energy transferred into molecular dissociation along with random diffusion, the molecular destruction cannot be reversed. Heavy radiation particles like alpha particles produce a great many ions per centimeter of tissue penetrated. Penetrating, energetic photons like gamma rays produce relatively few.
There are 6 forms of hazardous radiation commonly considered- alpha, beta, gamma, x-ray, ultraviolet and neutrons. Of these 6, alpha, beta, gamma and neutrons are of nuclear origin. X-ray and ultraviolet are “electronic” in origin, that is they arise from electron transitions outside of the nucleus. The matter of the origin of x-rays is often confused in the literature with some authors implying that x-rays are from the nucleus. I prefer to define x-rays as resulting from electron transitions at the atomic level.
Of the 4 nuclear radiation types mentioned above, alpha, beta, and neutrons are particles. Gamma rays are photons. The atomic nucleus is comprised of so-called nucleons which are protons and neutrons. Nucleons are composite particles comprised of quarks and can bind by the strong nuclear force. Alpha particles are helium-4 nuclei and neutrons are neutral particles with approximately the same mass as a proton or about 1 atomic mass unit. Neutrons are not stable outside of the nucleus and have a half-life of about 15 minutes. Free neutrons will undergo radioactive decay into a proton, an electron, and an electron antineutrino.
Like gamma rays, neutrons are neutral in charge and have great penetrating ability. However, neutrons are effectively scattered by collisions with the hydrogen atoms of biomolecules and water. As a result neutrons can be very destructive to living tissue. As a side note, paraffin wax and water are effective shielding materials for neutrons due to the high concentration of hydrogen atoms. The collisions with hydrogen atoms in living tissues is a means of dumping neutron kinetic energy into the bulk matter, resulting in dissociation of biomolecules.
The so-called “neutron bomb” was an explosive that was designed to produce an abundance of neutrons at the expense of explosive yield. During the early Reagan years in the US there was much public handwringing about these bombs and their ability to kill people but leave buildings standing. People seemed indignant that somehow this reduced the value of human life below that of material things in the grand calculation of destruction.
The characteristic mushroom shape rising to the sky after a nuclear air burst is just the result of a rapid release of energy and bomb debris in the air, but close enough to the ground to suck up soil. The “cap” of the mushroom results from the convectively rising point-source expansion of incandescent, debris-filled air from the point of energy release. The “stem” of the mushroom is a column of air that has rushed in to replace the rapidly rising fireball, picking up soil as it does so. There is nothing intrinsically nuclear about a mushroom cloud. Chemical explosives can do this as well.
Initially the fireball produces a strong pulse of thermal radiation. As this fireball develops, there is a momentary drop in radiant thermal energy due to the increasing opacity of the fireball. With further expansion the opacity of the fireball decreases and the thermal output increases. The shock wave and out-rush of air is obviously destructive, but the radiant thermal effects are not to be underestimated.
Another major effect of a nuclear blast is nuclear fallout. A nuclear blast unavoidably produces radioactive substances from the fission process and from neutron activation. A low altitude air burst is particularly troublesome because ground debris is sucked up into the air and contaminated with radionuclides. This material does what all suspended solids do, namely it is carried by the wind and falls back to earth gradually, contaminating a wide swath of ground. The finest particles remain suspended and are transported long distances, eventually falling out with rain or snow.
Finally, there are psychological effects associated with “the bomb.” It inevitably produces dread fear in people. This fear buttresses the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD.
Now that we are in a nuclear state of mind, let’s turn to what Putin intends to do with his nuclear arsenal. The Russians are not suicidal. Putin is neither crazy nor stupid. Russians have long understood where a nuclear confrontation with the West can go. They know escalation of nuclear war to full-scale would lead to mutual destruction of Russia and the West. The Russians know that the West has a policy of no first use with nuclear weapons and that we are extremely reluctant to use them. For the West, there is a firebreak between conventional and nuclear weapons. For the Russians, it is more of a continuum. They know that sabre rattling with their nuclear arsenal creates a good deal of anxiety in the rest of the world and Putin has been pushing this threat envelope to new levels and will keep doing so. Once a KGB guy, always a KGB guy. Putin obviously understands the pragmatics of coercion and the influential value of torture.
What nobody knows for sure is what happens when a Russian nuclear war shot is released. What does the West do? Respond in kind quickly or play the long game and see what happens next. How much planning has gone into nuclear conflict between two states outside of NATO? When would NATO step in? NATO is presently taking the side of Ukraine in terms of supplying money and arms but is studiously avoiding direct conflict with Russia. On the positive side, at least right now we aren’t bogged down with an endless middle east whack-a-mole exercise.
The best use of nuclear arms has always been and remains the threat of their use. Russia has been using this threat aggressively, even going so far as to blame Ukraine for planning a false flag operation with a “dirty bomb.”
Putin wants to see the alliance of the US and Europe disintegrate. He wants to see the American hegemony in place since WW II collapse. He wants to see the dominance of US culture, military reach, the influential dollar and prevalence of the default English language peel away. He wants to see Novorossiya rise from the ashes of the fallen USSR. But his vision requires the conquest of territory and cultural domination. The armed extinction project for Ukraine in process now will be followed by rebuilding the captured land with Russian infrastructure, political leaders and culture.
Russia, in its constant state of paranoia, wrings its hands about the “threat” of NATO at its border. The cruel irony is that it is hard to imagine that the West would find the conquest Russia possible or even desirable. The US-lead coalition was unable to get the medieval opium poppy kingdom of Afganistan under control with conventional weapons. How is it possible that we could even consider a preemptive invasion of Russia? Russia’s historical paranoia seems entirely self-serving for its authoritarian leaders.
One way to tear apart western alliances is to help them along with the demise of liberal democracy. Quietly support the internal cultural rot of individual nations by encouraging radical nationalism, white supremacy and political disharmony. It is happening all around us and especially here in the US. As badly as I’d love to entirely blame #45, I have to admit that he has only prodded a sleeping dragon. The MAGA and QAnon crowds were already out there. #45 has rallied them and validated their seething anger and indignation.
Today we have many people of great influence like Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Sean Hannity, nationalistic religious broadcasters, a stable of fringe political figures, and a mass of MAGA foot soldiers winning down-ticket elections moving their nationalistic and religious conservative agenda forward. Post-war baby boomers are being replaced with crowds and leaders who reject America’s present liberal democratic culture and leadership role in the world. There is growing open admiration for strongman authoritarian leadership. America’s experiment with fascism has already begun. Surprisingly, many Americans have expressed support for Putin.
Putin’s vicious attack on Ukraine, the rise of Trumpism with American fascism and a viral pandemic have overlapped within a narrow window of time- any one of which is a big problem by itself. It seems doubtful that MAGA right-wing crowds will have a change of heart in their vision for America. They will live out their lives within the same closed ideological space they are in presently. A political depolarization of America seems unlikely in the near term.
In this depressing global political climate it is more important than ever for the US to maintain its role as a thriving democratic culture and defender of those seeking democracy. Our leadership role in NATO must not waver against Russian aggression and expansionism. Russian expansionism will not end with Ukraine.
What will Putin do if he sees his internal political power structure collapsing? Will he ramp up the war to distract his opponents and rally the country? The present situation in Russia seems to suggest that rallying the population is more difficult than he anticipated.
It is hard to believe that Putin and his inner circle will change their ways in their lifetimes. They’ve painted themselves into a corner with their aggression and, like a trapped animal, will fight to the death. The cruel and murderous Joseph Stalin died in power. There is no reason to believe that Putin will be any different.
The President of South Korea, Yoon Suk-Yeol, was heard to utter into a hot mike that the US Congress were a bunch of idiots. To quote, he said “What an embarrassment for Biden, if these idiots refuse to grant it in Congress”. This occurred after a New York visit with President Biden after a discussion on US electric-vehicle subsidies. It is making headlines all over the internet. My schadenfreude detectors couldn’t resist this.
How defensive of the red, white and blue should you be if the guy is right? In theory the election process should select the best and brightest in the land. Instead, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Witness #45’s embrace of QAnon. If this was a story arc in a movie script, it would be rejected as too silly. Political parties and elections are supposed to exclude exemplars of bad judgement. I guess that nut jobs elect nut jobs.
And speaking of nut jobs, #45 was heard to say that presidents can declassify things “by thinking about it.” Even if this is true, it shouldn’t be as the present example illustrates. If this idiot learned to simply shut his damned mouth he’d have avoided half of his legal troubles automatically. He has his t*t in a wringer where it should be.
The colossal Baden Aniline and Soda Factory (BASF) verbund facility in Ludwigshafen, Germany, may have to make due with diminished energy supplies if the German state rations gas this fall. This facility is one of six BASF verbund sites and is the largest integrated chemical complex in the world. The site consists of 125 interconnected production plants on 10 square kilometers that share waste heat and generates it’s own electricity and steam. Forbes has described verbund as “… the intelligent interlinking of production plants, energy flows and infrastructure.”
There are many fascinating facts about BASF and the Ludwigshafen verbund site which can be found on the interwebs, so there in no point in duplicating it here. The point of this essay is that the global chemical industry is highly interconnected. Interruption of just one chemical complex like the BASF verbund in Ludwigshafen can lead to disruption in many supply chains in diverse markets. The chemical industry is a web of supply chains where the product of one plant is the raw material for another. Interruptions in energy or materials for one link in the chain will have knock-on effects in others all the way to the final consumer. Nothing unusual about this.
We’ve come to rely on a highly interconnected, interdependent world market that is susceptible to the consequences of political adventures from certain nations. Uncompromising nationalism, ethnic conflict, political turbulence and the current trend of fascist and violent ideology overrunning democratic freedom is threatening this house of cards we’ve built.
Technology can be quite delicate. The success of any given technology constantly depends on people practicing it, improving it and training for it. Whole technologies can be lost if interruptions in continuity from war or deep economic calamity last long enough.
Wow. There is a whole lot of pissin’ and moanin’ out there about Biden’s student loan payment program. A lot of it is bubbling to the surface like rotten egg gas in the mud pots of Facebook and Twitter. That wriggling libertarian tapeworm is deeply and firmly attached to the innards of a great many people.
I’m not going to waste precious heart beats trying to explain why a civilization should aid and encourage higher education. It should be obvious.
In an earlier chapter of American history, I graduated with a BA in chemistry owing $265 back in 1984. The whole time I had at least 2 jobs simultaneously and in two cities for part of that time. It is what I had to do to graduate without accumulating a lot of student loan debt. Later, in grad school, I received tuition remission and a stipend to study for a PhD. This is/was common for chemistry graduate students. The only cost for the ordeal was time, a divorce and my sanity.
Since that time tuition, student housing/rent, fees and other expenses have grown astronomically while wages and grants have not. State funding of colleges and universities has shifted from grants in favor of guaranteed student loans. The reprobates in congress have also passed laws that make escape from student loan payments through bankruptcy impossible.
As it has turned out, my generation of Baby Boomers has benefitted immensely from lower tuition in our time. Today, the picture for students is quite different. Student loan debts are drowning a great many people. We lived in a time that funded student aid with grants and scholarships that are either not available now or they didn’t grow with tuition increases. Today’s students are unable to save for house down payments or otherwise spend on other goods and services. It might even affect who you marry. Why marry into enormous long-term debt?
For many students, not signing the loan papers was equivalent to giving up on their dream of a better life. There are indeed plenty of jobs not requiring a college degree that can lead to a comfortable life. Starting your own business is not for everyone. We can’t all be a Bill Gates because ground fertile enough for a paradigm shift is fairly scarce.
Now, there is a chorus of indignant voices hissing that “I paid my debts- why shouldn’t you? Why should I pay for your debt?” I can’t argue with that except to say that canceling some fraction of student loan debt is reimbursement of what should have been tuition assistance in the first place. The situation shouldn’t have arisen to trigger people. The sum of $10,000 amounts to $2500 per year for 4 years. This is a reimbursement for a modest yearly tuition grant.
With the appearance of COVID and polio the USA, the news has revealed that it is possible to detect and monitor certain viruses in municipal sewage. As a chemist I marvel at this. Sewage is a frightfully complex mixture of biological waste products along with many chemical cleaning products, detergents, grime and pharmaceuticals that go down the drain. How is it that one can collect enough intact virus particles from this fecal hell broth with enough purity to make a positive identification of genetic material?
A recent methodology is given in an article titled Detection of Pathogenic Viruses in Sewage Provided Early Warnings of Hepatitis A Virus and Norovirus Outbreaks and published in Appl Environ Microbiol. 2014 Nov; 80(21): 6771–6781, DOI: 10.1128/AEM.01981-14 by Maria Hellmér,aNicklas Paxéus,bLars Magnius,cLucica Enache,bBirgitta Arnholm,dAnnette Johansson,bTomas Bergström,a and Heléne Nordera,c. As you can see the work is from 2014 so this is not brand-spanking-new technology. It is interesting to note that the material used to sediment the viruses in this article was acidified powdered skim milk proteins. The article was found by a Google search and located at the NIH National Library of Medicine.
Why powdered skim milk? It could be that milk fat interferes with the process or the workers are just removing variables. More likely, it is because the widely available powdered milk that you buy at the grocery store is from skim milk. Dairy fat is too valuable for a business to squander and is used to make more profitable products like ice cream or whipping cream.
In the 2014 article above, the virus particles are extracted from the raw sewage onto acidified powdered skim milk proteins and amplified with quantitative polymerase chain reaction, qPCR. Powdered milk may seem strange but realize that virus particles can be removed by coagulation with metal ions, lime or with other polyelectrolytes, including proteins. The charge distribution on milk proteins will vary with acidity so these methods are very pH dependent. The viruses are naturally coated in proteins and thus will acquire surface charges varying with pH. The coagulation of proteins occurs when dissolved or suspended proteins irreversibly change their secondary structure by unfolding and condense to form a thicker solution or a solid form. The formation of cheese by acidification or solidifying a runny egg with heat are common examples of coagulation.
A 1973 review article by Gerald Berg in Bull World Health Organ. 1973; 49(5): 451–460, reviews methods for the removal of viruses from effluents, so knowledge of the sedimentation, or coagulation, of viruses in sewage has been around for a long while.
These articles are written by specialists in the field and may present considerable difficulty for a few readers. I would urge those so inclined to try to plow through the articles and pick up what you can. This holds true for all scientific papers. See what you can learn.
An interesting question and answer piece has come out signed by Mykhailo Zahorodnii, Ukrainska Pravda. Zhyttia, titled (by Yahoo) “The atrocities committed by the Russians are their reaction to the fact they are nobody in their own country“. It is not a dispassionate bit of analysis by a senior historian, but rather by an experienced reporter from Ukraine. Yes, it is anti-Russian. It does not attempt to convey sympathy or fairness towards the Russian people. But, as one-sided as it is, I think that many valuable insights are made into the consequences of Russian history and also its politics over the last 30 years.
“And it [the Russian army] is doing the same thing to Ukraine as to Syria. That is, it is technically possible to turn every Ukrainian city into Aleppo. There are orders, there is no honour, there is no dignity, there are no human values.”
If Ukraine is to lose the war, then Russia should be made to pay dearly for it. However, Putin has stated Russian nuclear doctrine- they will only use nuclear weapons if the survival of the state is threatened. This is widely held to be true. The big question is, who decides what the existential threat to the state looks like? Putin decides, of course. This is why the US and Europe must avoid a ham-fisted foreign policy with Russia. The Russian president is a belligerent madman in charge of a nuclear state and whose fantasies about Russian manifest destiny are his guide. Tensions with Russia are here to stay for many years. Putin supported Trump for a reason. Trump “respected” Putin for unknown reasons. We need to keep American madman and rogue narcissist Trump and his ilk far away from foreign policy.
So, it turns out that I did time in Texas- 22 months to be exact. As a postdoc in a large central Texas city with the initials S.A. The natives were friendly, if not a little obsessed with the daily level of the Edwards Aquafer. If you absolutely have to live in Texas, SA is a decent choice. I do have to fault them on their choice of US Rep. Louie Gomert. An actual gibbering dunce if there ever was one. Imagine what kind of people were passed over in making that choice? But I digress.
On to the point. The Texas State Board of Educators recently made the news regarding their decision NOT to replace the word “slavery” with “involuntary relocation”. Evidently this antiseptic language was floated by a curriculum study group. The board, to their credit, unanimously directed the work group to revisit the language. Astute choice, folks.
According to the article in the San Antonio Current, GOP lawmakers (are there any other kind in Tejas?) are trying to shield students from discomfort in the classroom as with the mercurial issue of Critical Race Theory. Previously, in 2015, headlines were made when it was discovered that enslaved Africans brought to the US by the slave trade were described as “workers” in a social studies textbook. Sanitizing language on slavery is the first step to eliminating its tragic history altogether.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
