Category Archives: Politics

Where is Russia Going?

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What is the deal with Russia? Why do the Russian people tolerate the lack of basic freedoms we in the West are accustomed to? Dissatisfaction with their government has been there since the beginning. Hundreds of millions have been deprived of liberty and prosperity following Russian revolution.

The history of early 20th century reveals the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the formation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR). Later, after much blood and treasure was spilled after the revolution and then through the cold war, the Soviet Union collapsed after a brief attempt at openness. Many around the world saw the collapse as a positive thing and a sign of better times ahead, especially for the people of the former USSR. There was hope in the West for a transition to some variety of Russian-tinted democracy and for freedoms heretofore absent for the average citizens of the former USSR.

To Russians in power, the very idea of a democratic republic is alien and inconceivable. There is a baseline level of distrust and fear of the infectiousness of the democratic spirit among Russian/Soviet leadership. Even the population has been convinced that the moral collapse of the West would spread to their homeland without an iron-fisted leader.

For a part of the world that has been strangling under autocratic rule and economic stratification since before the time of the Tsars, there has not been a historical Russian-style power sharing agreement between the monarchy and the nobility or the serfs from which to build upon. After generations of polarization by Soviet propaganda focused on Western hegemony and the moral turpitude of the West, there was no likelihood of building upon a Western style democratic model. The Russian propaganda engine continues to this day as strong as ever but with the help of the internet, artificial intelligence and widespread political indifference or gullibility.

The decade of the 1990’s following the collapse of the former USSR was a time of redistribution of wealth for a lucky few. Large Soviet industrial sectors were absorbed by a few private interests, producing fabulously wealthy oligarchs. This did not go unnoticed by the populace, who simmered in anger over it because they expected a freedom and prosperity dividend from the collapse. Amidst the confusion and dissatisfaction with Russian President Yeltsin, there arose a growing sense that Russia needed a strongman leader. Many even spoke admiringly of Stalin.

The collapse of the USSR left an internal power vacuum that would soon be filled by former Soviet citizens. Boris Yeltsin was elected President of Russia in December 1991 and remained as President until 1999 when his selected successor Prime Minister and former FSB director Vlad Putin took over as acting president. Putin was elected president in May of 2000.

I’ve been trying to understand why present-day Russia seems so … belligerent. My focus to start with is Putin. Rather than being a one-of-a-kind freak of nature, Putin is rather ordinary as a dictator except that his regime has a nuclear triad. Until its invasion of Ukraine, Russia also had the benefit of whatever left-over respect it may have had from its Soviet military reputation. But that has changed dramatically.

Putin has long expressed the view that the collapse of the USSR was a tragedy. He wants to rebuild the stature of Russia into a global superpower. Soviet leaders held the view that in order for Moscow to be safe from attack by the West, the Slavic eastern European countries bordering Western Russia had to be under the wing of the Kremlin. It was this deep boundary in combination with the Russian winter that helped to wear down the invasions of Napolean and Hitler. Both armies were substantially weakened by traversing the extensive farmlands and steppes of Ukraine and Poland. It is difficult to believe that this thinking has changed since the collapse.

When the USSR collapsed it left much more than empty senior positions and titles to fill. The Soviet governing apparatus was abandoned when the Kremlin finally conceded that the USSR was economically unsustainable. Even a culture built upon bribery and corruption needs an all-encompassing structural skeleton to manifest its national identity and sustain an economy, security and a global presence. Even a corrupt government needs some sustainability.

Unfortunately for present day Russia, extensive government bribery and corruption in all sectors was already baked in from Soviet times. On a practical level, getting things done involved bribery. Bribes were expected and paid as a matter of routine in the military and all other areas of government. Today there have been show trials with certain high-level officials being tried, convicted and imprisoned on bribery charges. It gives the population bread and circuses to consume and hopefully optimism for a brighter future.

The USSR and later the Russian Federation did not have the benefit of English common law which evolved from the Magna Carta. Born of earlier conquest by the Rus, the Bolsheviks had nothing to build upon for a more democratic legal system like the American colonists had. Overall, Bolsheviks forcibly switched from monarchy to an autocratic socialist empire. Conquest of the tsarist Russian empire by the Bolsheviks was difficult because there were numerous groups vying for power, leading to the Russian civil war following the 1917 revolution.

Although Putin and the cranky Dimitry Medvedev have done a bit of nuclear saber rattling, the West has been concerned about Russian nukes since their very first test in the late 1940’s, so not much new here. Putin’s stern public warnings about nuclear retaliation were not necessary for the Western experts to be on alert. This apparent “virtue signaling” in the form of a public warning by Putin is just a part of Russia’s overall hybrid warfare approach. They’ll use every word and inflection uttered by Russian and Western media as well as the Kremlin to fortify their propaganda with doubt, suspicion and existential threats. They are also actively injecting propaganda into every media stream in the West they can manage. Putin’s dire public warnings about lowering the threshold for a tactical nuclear release were meant to cause a great clenching of public sphincters with the usual fear and loathing leading to internal political pressure for its enemies.

/*begin anecdote/*

Russia’s triad of Soviet-era nuclear weapons have been aging in storage. Are Russian nuclear bomb designs immune to shelf-life issues? By comparison, American-style nuclear weapons have a relatively short shelf-life because of their boosted triggers. According to one source, the entire US nuclear arsenal of nuclear triggers are boosted. American nuclear trigger designs have a short shelf-life stemming from tritium’s 4500 +/- 8 day half-life or 12.32 years (NIST, 2000). US fission triggers have a hollow core which contains a 1 to 1 deuterium-tritium mixture. This booster gas undergoes fusion during ignition in the center of the core and increases the fission yield by the release of abundant 14 MeV neutrons into the surrounding fissile material. With the use of a booster to breed neutrons, the critical mass of fissile explosive is reduced because more neutrons are dispersed to initiate a runaway fission while under intense compression. The reduced mass of fissile material in a bomb is also resistant to unintended ignition by a nearby source of neutrons, like a nearby nuclear explosion.

Tritium is 3H, with 1 proton and 2 neutrons. It undergoes a beta decay where a neutron decays to a proton and an ejected electron, forming 3Helium with 2 protons and a neutron. So, wouldn’t you know, 3Helium is a poison with a very high neutron capture cross section. An aging booster gas loses its tritium potency as well as gaining an effective neutron poison.

But for this application to work, an ongoing supply of tritium is required. Tritium must be produced in a breeder reactor or accelerator. In addition to its short half-life, tritium decay is problematic to monitor because of its low 5.7 keV average beta radiation energy. Tritium atoms or molecules can be detected and measured by mass spectroscopy, but its beta decay radiation requires special equipment to detect. Tritium emits very low energy, low penetrating beta particles which are limited to 6 mm of travel in air and are blocked by the dead layer of skin cells on the surface of the skin. Getting through the window of a Geiger-Muller tube is a problem. So, measurement of tritium activity requires a liquid scintillation detector or an ionization chamber. A sample of radioactive material is dissolved in a vial of scintillation cocktail and run through a scintillation detector which detects faint flashes of light corresponding particle emissions. Perhaps detectors using scintillation crystals like cesium iodide are available for tritium detection.

/*end anecdote/*

A History of Conflict

The lands of Eurasia have, over time, been overprinted with layers upon of layers of conflict over thousands of years. While it may seem reasonable to assume that the current national borders of Europe have finally overcome the urge for military conquest, this seems over-optimistic. The ease with which Putin dashed in to grab large tracts of Ukraine in 2014 show that land-grab invasions are not just left to the past.

The more you learn about the last 4000 years of history of the lands covering the British Isles to Portugal to Mongolia to north Africa and the Levant, the more apparent it is that battles of conquest and defense have overwhelmingly been the norm.

There have been so many armies who have fought bloody battles and died or prevailed on the Eurasian landscape since before Roman times, it is a wonder that there aren’t still great heaps of bones wrapped in rotted battle gear. As always, much remains below the surface in history.

Putin’s Botched War

The Putin-Ukraine war is a war of conquest begun by a dictator who somehow didn’t understand or foresee the accurate weapons made available to Ukraine by the USA and Europe. He misunderstood the willingness of the West to come to Ukraine’s aid, but also and maybe more importantly, the magnitude of the relative sophistication of Western armaments and war materiel. This was a major blunder. While Russian military intelligence should have kept the Kremlin updated on Western weaponry, Putin should have asked more penetating questions. But perhaps most importantly, he underestimated the combative spirit of the Ukrainians and their president.

How did Russia manage to fall so far behind the West in the art of war? A high reliance was placed on its giant fleet of tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery. Much of this equipment was left over from WWII and the cold war. In contrast to its ground operations, Russia’s use of airpower in the early days of the war was weak and ineffective. Western military strategy has a high reliance on air power.

Russia was completely unprepared for the evolving drone tactics used against them. Drones were able to provide intelligence and pinpoint delivery of relatively small bombs at critical locations on launchers, vehicles, individual soldiers and in trenches. While Russian tanks were covered with reactive armor, the Ukrainian drones could place bombs in weak spots on the vehicles or even drop them through crew hatches to the interior where propellant and warheads could be ignited.

Post-War

To the discredit of both Russia and Ukraine, extensive use of land mines as well as cluster munitions has been made. The immorality of these munitions lies in what happens to the left-over mines and cluster bomblets remaining after the conflict. After the war, the lands are going to be recovered and farmed or rebuilt. Land mines and cluster munitions are well known to remain extremely dangerous for decades. Other conflict zones that have been so mined have left a legacy of death and mutilation for civilians.

At some point, the victor of the Putin-Ukraine war will want to salvage the scrap metal of the many thousands of vehicle carcasses left on the battlefields. One question relates to the explosive reactive armor (ERA) on the exterior of the destroyed tanks. ERA consists of a sandwich of a metal “flyer plate” facing the incoming projectile, a layer of high brisance explosive, and another metal flyer plate facing the tank armor. In order to respond to a high velocity kinetic or shaped charged projectile, a high shock-velocity, highly energetic explosive is needed for fast response to impact by a projectile. The ERA must be insensitive to small arms fire.

A great many videos of the destruction of tanks show that a tank can be destroyed and its crew killed by artillery or drones, but a large fraction of the reactive armor remains. The reactive armor contains enough high explosive to diffuse some of the incoming projectile’s energy release, yet seems to be rather insensitive to the shock of a hit a few feet away. This unexploded reactive armor will need collection and disposal.

Ukrainian farmers will need to level out the thousands of bomb craters in their fields so their equipment can traverse the ground. Obviously, Sappers or bomb disposal crews will need to de-mine the roads and pathways. Extensive trench systems will need to be filled in to recover the croplands. The environmental insult to the bombed-out battlefields is already substantial. The environmental toxicity of explosive residues may need evaluation.

Finally, in victory the brave people of Ukraine face the daunting prospect of rebuilding their homeland. Generations of children have been exposed to serious trauma and violence that no one should have to face. Their childhoods have been stolen from them and their educational prospects badly damaged.

If Russia prevails, the citizens of Ukraine face loss of their national identity and progressive Russification. All of the post-war issues given above will still be present, but the economic and social upheaval resulting from a vengeful Russian takeover will be traumatic. Many Ukrainian fighters and political leaders will no doubt be jailed, sent to gulags or perhaps defenestration.

A Russian victory in Ukraine signals bad times ahead for the rest of eastern Europe and the Baltic states. These countries, Poland in particular, already understand this and are preparing for this eventuality. Putin has previously expressed a kinship with the Slavic peoples of Eurasia and this may be part of his motivation for establishing a Russian empire.

The Fall of the American Empire

As bad luck would have it, this aggressive act of Putin’s Russia coincided with a political catastrophe in the United States. The Republican Party (GOP) in America has adopted the old Tea Party platform including libertarians and ultraconservative evangelical Christians to morph into a party of fanatical fascists, sometimes called Christo-Fascists. This is a reprehensible development that has taken decades to pull off. These Make America Great Again (MAGA) people have decided that American democracy doesn’t work. They favor a weak, authoritarian flavored democracy, similar to what Orban in Hungary has led.

The combination of the election of Donald Trump along with allowance of dark money OK’d by the US Supreme Court, the fanatical support of MAGA voters and a detailed coup strategy penned by the Heritage Foundation and funded by numerous billionaires has turned America around the corner towards an ultra-nationalist dictatorship. Trump ignores the courts, the legal role of the congress, and has lately taken a fancy to sending troops into US cities.

Some knowledgeable scholars have offered that American hegemony, in place since the end of WWII, is all but over. Some estimate that the American empire reached its peak influence perhaps 15 years ago and has been in decline since then but Americans haven’t paid attention. Trump, with his claims on Panama, Canada and Greenland as well as his manic desire to impose tariffs on globally has sent American credibility into the waste bin. The global economic upset caused by Trump has forced former friends to forge new alliances, leaving America behind.

Even if the stars lined up right and Trump and Vance disappeared tomorrow, a return to the previous status quo is unlikely to happen. The rapid trade disengagement by Canada suggests that they have had serious doubts with the USA already and this Trump fiasco was the last straw. There has been grumbling by other nations in the past that the American 4-year presidential cycle leads to excessive and frequent foreign policy changes that cause difficulties for them.  

Trump’s “America First” declaration and radical disengagement with previous foreign policy has left an apparent power vacuum in the world. This has not gone unnoticed by anyone. Of course, the BRICS nations (Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russian Federation, South Africa, and United Arab Emirates) are taking advantage of this sea change and are considering moving from the US dollar as the principal reserve currency. America is willingly abandoning its historical global stabilizing ability in exchange for a more libertarian internal structure.

Deconstruction of the USA

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The idiot RFK, Jr

The very idea that a person like RFK, Jr, would land in Trump’s cabinet as the Secretary of Health and Human Services seemed so farfetched as to be bad pulp fiction. Yet there he is.

I have no special insights or knowledge on HHS other than what I read. Everything that could be said about the pathetic case of RFK, Jr, and his place in pseudoscientific madness has already been stated by better writers than I.

If you wanted to purposely obliterate certain patches of modern medical developments from the last 120 years, there are few better hatchet-men than RFK, Jr. RFK, Jr., is not without a certain charisma. His strength of conviction is taken as a measure of truth. He is a talented speaker despite his speech impediment and, like most popular speakers, is a performer playing to the entire USA. His compelling position on the stage lends a credibility to his assertions. His slashing of HHS funding and staff is jaw dropping in its extent and coverage.

The University-Government-Industry R&D Complex

Until Trump, the USA had accumulated considerable technological ‘soft power‘ internationally since WWII. An element of that soft power is the American University-Government-Industry research complex. The government funds basic university research across the spectrum of science and the universities provide basic research and training of scientists and engineers. Industry taps into this valuable technology resource for skilled technologists and develops applied science for their projects.

The USA has been a very productive engine of ingenuity, especially since the beginning of WWII. However, our dear leader’s administration has been deconstructing agencies in the name of rooting out the deep state. In reality he is busy putting in place his own deep state.

Project 2025, hosted by the Heritage Foundation, amounts to a libertarian coup backed by libertarian hardliners and supported by conservative protestant evangelical Christians. I’m trying to be fair to the evangelicals, but they have woven Trump into their Christian eschatology. They may still support #47, but many are holding their noses in doing so.

Why not remove the university research funding and leave it to industry? To our neoliberal friends that might sound appealing. Universities could continue to produce scientists and engineers but leave the R&D to industry. After all, letting the open market take care of R&D is one of the goals, right? Let industry produce and pay for their own R&D talent.

The problem will be that new R&D chemists hired into a company at the PhD level would have to be trained on how to execute chemical R&D. Normally this happens in graduate school and in a post doc appointment. But wouldn’t business prefer to hire walking, talking, trained, young and energetic chemistry researchers? I think so.

In #47’s administration, research efforts are being discontinued willy nilly by inexperienced and scientifically untrained actors whose only goal is to rack up dollar savings. Their amateur appraisal of what constitutes valuable scientific activity is cartoonish.

Having been in both academic and industrial R&D, my observation is that basic and commercial science can be quite different activities. Universities have a continuous stream of fresh students and post docs to do the actual work of research at a time period in their lives when they are the most productive and at a far lower labor cost than could industry. Benefits, if any, are quite modest.

The current approach simultaneously trains scientists and engineers while at the same time developing basic science and engineering for the price of a one or more grants. In the process, the advanced instrumentation and the many subject matter experts walking around in the building aid academic research greatly. If a transformation (i.e., a reaction) goes poorly, an academic lab may try to find a mechanism. A commercial R&D lab exists solely for the purpose of supporting profitable production. This means developing the best routes for the fastest conversion and highest yields of chemicals into money. Along the way, commercial chemists may discover new chemistries or have unexpected outcomes. If they are lucky, any given R&D ‘discovery’ may lead to a new product or better control of a reaction. The result of commercial R&D may be more profitable processing but also it may be of scientific interest.

The role of the university is quite different from the role of industry in our society. Universities are funded to provide leading edge research. Here, knowledge is acquired by exploring the boundaries of particular chemical transformations or in the realm of calculation. The driving force in academic R&D is funding and publication. Every scientist wants to be the first person to discover new processes and compositions. It is not uncommon in academics for a research program to finish with a sample of 2 milligrams of product for spectroscopic analysis. For a proof-of-concept result, a sample small enough to analyze and still get a mass for the yield closes the work.

The preferred role of industry is to take up where academia leaves off. If a known composition and/or process is commercially viable, the captains of industry would prefer not to fund enough basic R&D to get a product to market. Thirty minutes on SciFinder should provide an indication of the viability of a process to produce a given chemical substance. They would prefer their chemists work on scaleup to maximize the profit margin of a market pull product rather than wading into the murky waters of technology push.

You learn to do laboratory research by doing laboratory research. Reading about it is necessary but not enough. The success of much research requires broad and deep knowledge and specialized lab and instrument skills.

The industrial end is a bit different from academia. In applied science there are two bookends in business-to-business product development-

  • Market Pull is development to produce products that are already articles or processes of commerce or are analogs of existing solutions. At the commodity level, a producer must compete with existing suppliers. Market pull is the domain of producers who compete on price and service, offering products that may be substantially similar.
  • Technology Push is the development of new technologies (components and processes) awaiting first adopters. A customer must be convinced that a new technology is worth the risk of committing to it. Customers are generally aware that a new technology may develop teething pains leading to unanticipated expenses and disruption of the timeline.

In order for a company to allocate resources for an R&D project, sales projections, cost and margin studies must be performed to convince management to proceed. A great starting point is with a known substance and a good public domain procedure for it. This is where academia really shines. Industrial R&D will collect academic research papers on all aspects of the production of a new product.

One serious caveat for industrial R&D is the intellectual property (IP) status of all of the compositions of matter and the processes used therewith. In chemistry, IP is divided between the composition of matter and the method or process. Chemistry patents are often written with Markush claims that use variables to enrobe vast swaths of compositions of matter within patent coverage.

Some academics file for patents as inventors, leaving the ownership costs to the university assignees. The thinking has been that the university may someday collect license fees from the invention. The wild-eyed inventors may honestly believe that industry will beat a path to their door wanting licenses. More chemical patents of all kinds are allowed to quietly expire unlicensed than most realize.

Research IssueUniversityIndustry
Discovery of new chemistryBuilt to excel in itCan do but would much rather avoid the expense and time
Publication of resultsCritical to career growth and scientific progressResearch developments are confidential
Patenting IPMixed views. Some patents may provide revenue to the university. Patents that are contested are very expensive to protect.Patents enforce exclusivity for 20 years and cement competitiveness of the assignees.
R&DMuch time and care can be spent on the research. Research is distributed through publications and seminars.Prefers that existing R&D be applied to scale-up and process improvements
Career growthStudents, post docs and professors can choose academics or industryScientists can take the business path or stay on the R&D path
Safe and smart technologyAcademics have the ability to pursue environmental and safety matters with the chemistry.Industry is a slave to quarterly growth. Changes that will increase the quarterly EBITDA are most favored by the C-suite and the board of directors.
“A patent is only as good as the latest attempt to invalidate it”. -Arnold Ziffel.

Some loose talk about patents

Many in academia view a patent as a publication that they can stuff into their vitae. While being awarded a patent is a validation of an idea, it also means that the examiner was unable to find a reason to deny the patent. Citizens are entitled to patents and the USPTO must find a reason to deny the application. The language in a patent application must be internally consistent, be written in the ‘patent dialect’ and provide a description for others to understand the claimed art enough to avoid infringement. The USPTO does not require that the reality of the claims be proven. (I’ve been involved in 2 technology startups based on patents that were not proven by prototyping because it was not required by the USPTO. Both were business disasters because the claimed art didn’t work well enough).

Patents can induce a high credibility impression that may or may not be valid. Patents are commonly used to impress investors and are found stapled to a business plan. The startup may have an attorney on the board of directors who is supposed to serve as council. The attorney may or may not be a patent attorney. But if they do not possess patent and technical knowledge, they can only help with word smithing documents like NDAs, contracts, and sitting in on meetings to catch the odd procedural misstep. They can bring confidence and comfort to the startup founders with business structure, agreements, and negotiations etc., sorta like a big ole’ teddy bear for the CEO.

Summary

One of the purposes of government is to protect ourselves from each other. Another purpose that has worked well until now is that gov’t has been able to blunt many of the harsh and brutal forces of nature like disease, famine, drought, earthquakes and storms.

The USA has excelled in medical research for decades. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was begun to assure that food and drugs were safe for the public to consume. Every new drug developed in the USA has a paper storm trailing behind it. To be compliant with FDA generally, a sizeable amount of operational rigor must be demonstrated and practiced. Food safety in restaurants and in the food supply chain as well as drug development and testing are all subject to complacency or outright evasion without gov’t oversight. People and organizations will always drift away from safe practices if nobody is watching and auditing.

Organizations, like individuals, behave like a gas. They will expand to the space available. Retiring government regulations means that there will be a good deal of new space to expand into. Regulations were originally conceived to solve or prevent problems.

Time to Dump Chuck Schumer

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C’mon Democratic Party!! Don’t waste time trying to convince Schumer to pull his thumb out of his a$$. For everything there is a season and the MAGA win in the November 2024 election marks the end of Schumer’s season and the freshening spring season for MAGA. Out to pasture he needs to go. Maybe he can get an adjunct professor slot at a university teaching economics recitation sections.

It is time for Democrats to match the ferocity of MAGA’s political rhetoric. Being polite, using history and logic or even shaming them is a complete waste of time. They are on a libertarian high from years of carrying forward Reagan’s antigovernment rhetoric.

Civility should always be tried first in any conflict, but continued civility is a fool’s errand in the face citizens who voted for and continue to support Trump’s authoritarianism.

It’s time to get mad. Very mad. Not with violence but with pressure and votes. What the MAGA GOP is presently doing to our beloved country may well be irreversible to some extent. I don’t care to live in a country satisfied with Trump authoritarian leadership. Trump is replacing what he calls the “deep state” with an even darker deep state of his own design. The cult of the Orange Jesus needs to be driven out.

It all boils down to votes. The Dems need an effective ground game to get people to the polls. Political actions that do not produce more liberal or at least anti-MAGA votes is a waste of effort.

Each voting Dem should bring along one liberal non-voter or at least anti-Trump non-voter to the polls the next few elections. The mantra for Democrats should be- “Anti-Trump + 1”.

ANTI-TRUMP VOTER + 1 Encourage a non-voter to vote Democratic!

Robet Reich pointed out in today’s (3/25/25) Substack email that what he calls the Pillars of Civil Society are under attack by the Trump administration. The pillars are- the universities, science, the media and the law.

Source: Robert Reich substack newsletter, 3/25/25. You may recall that he is something of a talented cartoonist.

The legacy media, at least, is covering Trump at roughly the level of entertainment news. There is some tut-tutting and rubber necking by the big news shops like NBC, CBS and ABC. NPR continues to try to be as neutral as possible allowing listeners to decide for themselves what is outrageous. The well-known MAGA friendly broadcasters are

Tyranny is Pulling up the Driveway

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Roughly half of the American electorate sits immobilized while watching the American version of democracy slowly crossfade into some lesser form. We can lament in the (n + 1)th essay about #45/47’s inauguration and how that very day they begin deconstructing the federal government. But, by now whining about Trump and the GOP is nothing more than preaching to the choir.

As a practical matter in opposition, liberals are left to make phone calls to our representatives or slap a bumper sticker on our Subarus. The real power lies in the ability to donate cash to the party or the candidate. Even a heartfelt protest in front of a building or an assembly of the faithful listening to the other side’s politico is rarely effective in any measurable way.

If there was a lottery for the chance to have a 5 minute sit-down face to face with president #47, I’d buy $1000 worth of tickets. I’d spend the whole time yelling at him with all of the bile I could heave.

Tyranny is a word often used by 2nd Amendment gun enthusiasts as a euphemism for government. Libertarians and Republicans are fond of it in particular. But if the mandate is to prevent tyranny, will they recognize it from Trump?

The words “Competitive Democracy” is appearing more frequently in the Googlesphere. A decent explanation is found below-

“There is another tradition of democratic theory (tracing its roots back to the work of Joseph Schumpeter), which considers the competition for political leadership to be the central feature of democratic institutions. Both the aggregative and the deliberative views tend to focus on what the state does with its power, rather than who gets to exercise it. Democratic institutions, according to these views, are designed to ensure that the content of legislation somehow reflects the general will. The competitive model shifts the emphasis away from the content of legislation towards those who enact it.”  Source: Competitive Model of Democracy.

This whole Trump takeover of the federal government seems to have a libertarian flavor. No social safety nets, low taxes, expanded freedoms, diminished regulatory oversight and privatization of everything. Every service we get from the government would be privatized. Our every need or problem should be viewed as profit opportunity by a capitalist. Our present form of health care is like this.

My sarcastic definition of Libertarianism: it is the theoretical foundation of a Dickensian world where upward mobility of the lower class is near impossible, with the upper class comfortably nested across a yawning gap of wealth.

All of the open talk of upcoming fascism and authoritarianism makes me wonder if tyranny isn’t already pulling up the driveway to stay for a while. Isn’t tyranny what the 2nd Amendment gun crowd was always going on about? Will they notice that tyranny is presently being installed in the USA? Or is it the flavor of tyranny they prefer?

Trump is quickly placing loyalists into every part the federal government that uses power. He has the DOJ, CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, the US House & Senate, Inspectors General and more. He is consolidating power for himself. He has even started on the military.

Loyalty to Trump is demanded. But, isn’t loyalty to Trump just political loyalty? He often replies to criticism saying that his critics are “just being political.” He is placing political loyalists into positions of power to “fix” a condition that he previously called the swamp. The swamp was a federal workforce that were supposedly loyal to liberalism, according to him. He is replacing one allegedly unloyal group with his own loyalists. He is filling the offices with his own weaponized staff.

Typical Trump- he makes accusations of impropriety while he is doing it himself.

Trump’s adoring cult followers can somehow see around his wide load of character flaws and felonies to steal a view of a fabulous future he dangles before them. Is this a new dawn of a great America or just another America under a cult of personality?

Our Pouty President Announced US withdrawal from World Health Organization

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Manhattan real estate magnate DJ Trump, US President and amateur epidemiologist, has announced that the US will exit the World Health Organization (WHO), according to Reuters.

‘Trump said the WHO had failed to act independently from the “inappropriate political influence of WHO member states” and required “unfairly onerous payments” from the U.S. that were disproportionate to the sums provided by other, larger countries, such as China.’ Reuters, January 21, 2025.

MAGA’s spiritual hero and standard bearer also said that his administration would cease negotiations on the WHO pandemic treaty during the withdrawal process. He still seethes over WHO from his previous administration and claims that they mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic. Trumps words read as pouty and not powerful.

This kerfuffle does not appear to be a bluff. Trump has a long history of refusing to pay contractors who have completed projects for him, claiming that they were attempting to rip him off. This move casts a similar shadow. Even if he personally benefits by the work of others, he has had no trouble stiffing them on their bills. This history of nonpayment blended with his spectacular ignorance of everything technical adds up to this stupid move. His transactional mind is only one dimensional, apparently, and is blind to the importance of WHO. Infectious disease can move beyond national borders and into the US at 500 miles per hour via jet aircraft as was the case of HIV/AIDS. An international entity is needed to intervene, especially in the spread of infectious disease.

One would suppose that the US, as the largest donor to WHO, would have had more leverage in renegotiation on payments or other objectionable issues.

#45-47 is a guy who commuted sentences and pardoned 1500 people who participated in the January 6th, 2021 riot and destructive and illegal entry into the US capitol building. This despite complete video evidence and guilty verdicts. Below is a quote by the QAnon, the horned shaman-

“I JUST GOT THE NEWS FROM MY LAWYER… I GOT A PARDON BABY! THANK YOU PRESIDENT TRUMP!!!” Jacob Chansley, dubbed the QAnon shaman as a reflection of his horned-animal headdress and body paint at the January 6, 2021, riot inside the U.S. Capitol, posted on X shortly after President Donald Trump commuted the sentences of or pardoned all those convicted of crimes related to the events of that day. “NOW I AM GONNA BY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!! I LOVE THIS COUNTRY!!! GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!” he continued. “J6ers are getting released & JUSTICE HAS COME… EVERYTHING done in the dark WILL come to light!”

So, let the idiot gets his guns. This was his reflex after getting out of prison. Make yer momma proud, bucko.

Thus, a truly ugly chapter continues in the history of our country.

A Cold Wind Blowing

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Somebody mentioned that the fellow who wants to take over Greenland moved the inauguration indoors due to the cold. Perhaps it should always have been indoors due to January weather, but the inauguration belongs to the people who elected the new POTUS and VPOTUS. They (we) should get to witness it directly. Some wag has suggested that the move was really to prevent low public attendance from being visible.

The ceremony will be limited to the upper crust of politicians and big wheels. In the confined space of the Capitol Rotunda the turnout is guaranteed to look packed, which will please the ratings-conscious Felon in Chief.

I’ll miss out on the proceedings this time. Too painful to watch.

Sustainability? Can We Reinforce the House of Cards that Civilization has Become?

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Ask yourself this- will your descendants in the year 2125 share in the creature comforts coming from the extravagant consumption of resources that we presently enjoy? Shouldn’t the concept of “sustainability” include the needs of 4-5 generations down the line?

The word ‘sustainability’ is used in several contexts and in contemporary use remains a fuzzy concept with few sharp edges. In this post I will refer to the sustainability of raw materials, fully recognizing that it covers numerous aspects of civilization.

There are wants and there are needs. For the lucky among us in 21st century developed nations, our needs are more than satisfied leaving surplus income to satisfy many of our wants. Will our descendants a century from now even have enough resources to meet their needs after our historical wanton and extravagant consumption of resources dating to the beginning of the industrial age? Our technology stemming from the earth’s economically attainable resources has done much to soften the jagged edges of nature’s continual attempts to kill us. After each wave of nature’s threats to life itself, survivors get back up only to face yet more natural disasters, starvation and disease. This is where someone usually offers the phrase “survival of the fittest”, though I would add ” … and the luckiest”.

What will descendants in 100 or 200 years require to fend off the harshness of nature and our fellow man? Pharmaceuticals? Medical science? Fuels for heat and transportation? Will citizens in the 22nd century have enough helium for the operation of magnetic resonance imagers or quantum computers? Will there be enough economic raw materials for batteries? Will there be operable infrastructure for electric power generation and distribution? Lots of questions that are easy to ask but hard to answer because it requires predicting the future.

Come to think about it, does anyone worry this far in advance? The tiny piece of the future called “next year” is as much as most of us can manage.

Humans would do well to remember that a great many of the articles that we rely on are manufactured goods, such as: automobiles, aerospace-anything, pharmaceuticals, oil & gas, metals, glass, synthetic polymers (i.e., polyethylene, polypropylene, PVC, polystyrene etc.), medical technology and electrical devices of all sorts. Each of these categories split off into subcategories all the way back to a farm or a mine. And let’s remember that both mining and farming are both reliant on big, expensive machinery and lots of water.

The point is that nearly everything we have come to rely on sits at the super apex of many foundational apex technologies.

Each of the contributing technologies holding up any given apex technology were new and wondrous at one time. Think of a modern multicore microprocessor chip. Follow the chip’s raw materials back to the mines and oil & gas wells where the raw materials originated. Once you’ve done that, consider all of the people and inputs necessary in each step getting from the mine to the assembly of a working microprocessor. Each device, intermediate component or refined substance is at or near the apex of some other technology pyramid. To keep moving forward, people need to connect each apex technology input in a way to get to their own apex endpoint.

We mustn’t forget all of the machinery and components, energy to power them, transportation and trained personnel needed to manufacture any given widget. Skilled hands must be found to make everything work.

A given technology using manufactured goods is a house of cards kept upright by constant attention, maintenance, quality control and assurance, continuous improvement and hard work by sometimes educated and trained people. Then, there is a stable society with institutions, regulations and a justice system that must support the population. The technology driving our lifestyles does not derive from sole proprietor workshops in a corrugated iron Quonset building along the rail spur east of town. The highly advanced technology that is driving economic growth and the comfortable lives we enjoy comes from investors and factories and international commerce. A great many products we are dependent on like cell phones are affordable only because of the economies of large-scale production.

So, what is the point of this? Sustainability must also include some level of throttle back in consumption without upsetting the apple cart.

A plug for climate change

For a moment, let’s step away from the notion that the atmosphere is so vast that we cannot possibly budge it into a runaway warming trend. The atmosphere covers the entire surface of the planet with all of its nooks and crannies, but its depth is not correspondingly large. In fact, the earth’s atmosphere is rather thin.

At 18,000 feet the atmospheric pressure drops to half that at sea level. The 500 millibar level varies a bit but is generally near this altitude. This means that half of the molecules in the atmosphere are at or below 18,000 feet. This altitude, the 500 millibar line, isn’t so far away from the surface. From the summits if the 58 Fourteeners in Colorado, it is only 4000 ft up. That is less than a mile. The Andes and the Himalayan mountains easily pierce the 500 millibar line.

Our breathable, inhabitable atmosphere is actually quite thin. The Earth’s atmosphere tapers off into the vacuum of space over say 100 km, the Kármán line. Kármán calculated that 100 km is the altitude at which an aircraft could no longer achieve enough lift to remain flying. While this is more of an aerodynamics based altitude than a physical boundary between the atmosphere and space, the bulk of the atmosphere is well below this altitude. With the shallow depth of the atmosphere in mind, perhaps it seems more plausible that humans could adversely affect the atmosphere.

The lowest distinct layer of the atmosphere is the troposphere beginning as the planetary boundary layer. This is where most weather happens. In the lower troposphere, the atmospheric temperature begins to drop by 9.8 °C per kilometer or 5.8 oF per 1000 ft of altitude. This is called the dry adiabatic lapse rate. (With increasing altitude the temperature gradient decreases to about 2 oC per kilometer at ~30,000 ft in the mid-latitudes where the tropopause is found. The tropopause is where the lapse rate reaches a minimum then the temperature remains relatively constant with altitude. This is the stratosphere.)

Over the last 200 years in some parts of the world, advances in medicine, electrical devices, motor vehicles, aerospace, nuclear energy, agriculture and warfare have contributed to what we both enjoy and despise in contemporary civilization. The evolving mastery of energy, chemistry and machines has replaced a great deal of sudden death, suffering and drudgery that was “normal” affording a longer, healthier lives free of many of the harmful and selective pressures of nature. Let’s be clear though, continuous progress relieving people of drudgery can also mean that they may be involuntarily removed from their livelihoods.

It is quintessentially American to sing high praises to capitalism. It is even regarded as an essential element of patriotism by many. On the interwebs capitalism is defined as below-

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

As I began this post I was going to cynically suggest that capitalism is like a penis- has no brain. It only knows that it wants more. Well, wanting and acquiring more are brain functions, after all. Many questions stand out, but I’m asking this one today. How fully should essential resources be subject to raw capital markets? It has been said half in jest that capitalism is the worst economic system around, except for all of the others.

I begin with the assumption that it is wise that certain resources should be conserved. Should it necessarily be that a laissez faire approach be the highest and only path available? Must it necessarily be that, for the greater good, access to essential resources be controlled by those with the greatest wealth? And, who says that “the greater good” is everybody’s problem? People are naturally acquisitive- some much more than others. People naturally seek control of what they perceive as valuable. These attributes are part of what makes up greed.

Obvious stuff, right?

The narrow point I’d like to suggest is that laissez faire may not be fundamentally equipped to plan for the conservation and wise allocation of certain resources, at least as it is currently practiced in the US. Businesses can conserve scarce resources if they want by choosing and staying with high prices, thereby reducing demand and consumption. However, conservation is not in the DNA of business leaders in general. The long-held metrics of good business leadership rest on the pillars of growth in market share and margins. Profitable growth is an important indicator of successful management and a key performance indicator for management.

First, a broader adoption of resource conservation ideals is necessary. Previous generations have indeed practiced it, with the U.S. national park system serving as a notable example. However, the scarcity of elements like Helium, Neodymium, Dysprosium, Antimony and Indium, which are vital to industry and modern life, this raises concerns. The reliance of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) operations on liquid helium for their superconducting magnets poses the question of whether such critical resources should be subject to the whims of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism. While some MRI operators utilize helium recovery systems, not all do, leading to further debate on whether the use of helium for frivolity should continue, given its wasteful nature.

Ever since the European settlement of North America began, settlers have been staking off claims for all sorts of natural resources. Crop farmland, minerals, land for grazing, rights to water, oil and gas, patents, etc. Farmers in America as a rule care about conserving the viability of their topsoil and have in the past acted to stabilize it. But, agribusiness keeps making products available to maximize crop yields, forcing farmers to walk a narrower line with soil conservation. Soil amendments can be precisely formulated with micronutrients, nitrogen and phosphate fertilizers to reconstitute the soil to provide for higher yields. Herbicides and pesticides are designed to control a wide variety of weeds, insect and nematode pests. Equipment manufacturers have pitched in with efficient, though expensive, machinery to help extract the last possible dollars’ worth of yield. Still other improvements are in the form of genetically modified organism (GMO) crops that have desirable traits allowing them to withstand herbicides (e.g., Roundup), drought or a variety of insect, bacterial, or fungal blights. The wrench in the gears here is that the merits of GMO crops have not been universally accepted.

Livestock production is an advanced technology using detailed knowledge of animal biology. It includes animal husbandry, nutrition, medicines, meat production, wool, dairy, gelatin, fats and oils, and pet food production. There has been no small amount of pushback on GMO-based foods in these areas, though. I don’t follow this in detail, so I won’t comment on GMO.

The point of the above paragraphs is to highlight a particular trait of modern humans- we are demons for maximizing profits. It comes to us as naturally as falling down. And maximizing profits usually means that we maximize throughput and sales with ever greater economies of scale. Industry not only scales to meet current demand, but scales to meet projected future demand.

Extracting a mineral resource to its exhaustion has been prevalent in history. The question is, is it inevitable or can or should it be throttled back? But who will do that in the face of market demand?

Essentially everyone will likely have descendants living 100 years from now. Won’t they want the rich spread of comforts and consumer goods that we enjoy today? Today we are producing consumer goods that are not made for efficient economic resource recovery. Batteries of all sorts are complex in their construction and composition. Spent batteries may have residual energy left in them and have chemically hazardous components like lithium metal. New sources of lithium are opening up in various places in the world, but it is still a nonrenewable and scarce resource. This applies to cobalt as well.

Helium is another nonrenewable and scarce resource that in the US comes from a select few enriched natural gas wells. At present we have an ever-increasing volume of liquid helium consumption in superconducting magnets across the country that need to remain topped off. This helium is used in all of the many superconducting magnetic resonance imagers (MRI) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers in operation worldwide. Quantum computing will also consume considerable liquid helium as it scales up since temperatures below the helium boiling point of 4.22 Kelvin are required.

As suggested above, today’s MR imagers can be equipped with helium boil off recovery devices that recondense helium venting out of the cryostat and direct it back into a reservoir. One company claims that their cold head condensers are so efficient that users do not even have to top off with helium for 7-10 years. That seems a bit fantastic, but that has been claimed. Helium recovery is a good thing. Hopefully it is affordable for most consumers of MRI liquid helium.

In the history of mining in the US and elsewhere, it has been the practice of mine owners to maximize the “recovery” of run-of-mill product when prices are high. Recovery always proceeds to the exhaustion of the economical ore or the exhaustion of financial backing of the mining company. Uneconomical ore will remain in the ground, possibly for recovery when prices are more favorable. It is much the same for oil and gas. As with everything, investors want to get in and get out quickly with the maximum return and minimum risk. They don’t want their investment dollars to sit in the ground waiting for the distant future in order to satisfy some pointy headed futurist and their concern for future generations.

It is not normally in the nature of for-profit corporate C-suite executives to aim for resource conservation. People answerable to a board of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize wealth generation for the shareholders. The world of industry is the world of growth. The world of “let’s make enough to get by” is not the world of people who rise to the C-suite. Unfortunate perhaps, but true.

What is needed in today’s world is the ability to conserve resources for our descendants. It requires caring for the future along with a good deal of self-control. Conservation means recycling and reduced consumption of goods. But it also means tempering expectations for extreme wealth generation, especially for those who aim for large scale production. While large scale production yields the economies of scale, it nevertheless means large scale consumption as well. In reality, this is contrary to the way most capitalism is currently practiced around the world.

Sustainability

The libertarian ideal of applying market control to everything is alleged to be sustainable because in appealing to everyone’s self-interest, future economic security is in everyone’s interest. If high consumption of scarce resources is not in our long-term self-interest, then will the market find a way to prolong it? As prices rise in response to scarcity, consumption should drop. ECON-101 right? Well, what isn’t mentioned is that it’s today’s self-interest. What about the availability of scarce resources for future generations? Will the market provide for that?

What does “sustainability” really mean? Does it mean that today’s high consumption is sustained, or does it mean resource conservation by reduced consumption?

Is the goal of energy sustainability to maintain the present cost of consumption but through alternative means? Reduced consumption will occur when prices get high enough. As the cost of necessities rises, the cash available for the discretionary articles will dry up. How much of the economy is built on non-essential, discretionary goods and services? The question is, does diminished consumption have to be an economic hard landing or can it be softened a bit?

Where does technological triumphalism take us?

The generation and mastery of electric current has been one of the most consequential triumphs of human ingenuity of all time. It is hard to find manufactured goods that have not been touched by electric power somewhere in the long path from raw materials to finished article. As of the date of this writing, we are already down the timeline by many decades as far as the R&D into alternative electrification. What we are faced with is the need to continue rapid and large scaling-up of renewable electric power generation, transmission and storage for the anticipated growth in renewable electric power consumption for electric vehicles.

Our technological triumphalism has taken us to where we are today. The conveniences of contemporary life are noticed by every succeeding generation who, naturally, want it to continue. This necessitates that the whole production and transportation apparatus for goods and services already in place must continue. We have both efficient and inefficient processes in operation, so there is still room for more triumph. But eventually resources will become thin and scarcity of strategic minerals becomes rate limiting. Economies may or may not shift to bypass all scarcity of particular articles.

Perhaps a transition from technological triumphalism to minimalist triumphalism could take place. The main barrier there is to figure out how to make reduced consumption profitable. Yes, operate by a low volume, high margin business model. That already works for Rolls Royce, but what about cell phones and sofas?

Something else that stymies attempts at reduced consumption is price elasticity. This is where an increase in price fails to result in a drop in demand. Necessary or highly desirable goods and services may not drop in demand if the price increases at least to some level. As with the price of gasoline, people will grumble endlessly about gas prices as they stand there filling their tanks with expensive gasoline or diesel. Conservation of resources has to overcome the phenomenon of price elasticity in order to make a dent without shortages.

A meaningful and greater conservation of resources will require that people be satisfied with lesser quantities of many things. In history, people have faced a greatly diminished supply of many things, but not by choice. Economic depression, war and famine have imposed reduced consumption on whole populations and often for decades. When the restriction is released, people naturally return to consumption as high as they can afford.

The technological triumph reflex of civilization has allowed us to paint ourselves into a resource scarcity corner.

I’d like to believe that humanity could stave off the enviable conflict that would spark from numerous critical resource shortages, but I doubt the people and nations of the world can do it.

Them Texicans

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Question: What’s the deal with the government of Texas?

Reply: We don’t have enough time for that.

Governor Greg Abbott, aka by some as “Wheelie”, has ordered all flags be raised to full staff in honor of Inauguration Day, pursuant to federal statute.

At first this doesn’t seem to be much of an event, but it is plainly and uniquely a petty act of defiance against the nation’s honoring of the life and death of 39th US President Jimmie Carter, a Democrat btw, taking less priority than the Trump’s inauguration. It is so … Texas.

As a coworker from South Carolina used to say, “You can always tell a Texan, but you can’t tell ’em much”. I repeat this saying only out of love. I have great respect for the citizens and land of Texas. I made many life-long friends and colleagues there. But the GOP government is regressing the state and softening the populace for increasing theocracy.

Texas state politics has a very strong Republican and evangelical protestant conservative bent to it. That is no secret. The state also has a very strong independent streak and many brag that they can choose to become independent again at any time. I don’t care enough to dedicate heartbeats to validate this, but I heard it many times. MAGA Texas Governor Abbott is a true populist to conservative voters and Democrats can go suck eggs. The state government is ultraconservative and will likely remain that way for decades.

Happier Texas Anecdotes

I did time in Texas- 22 months to be exact. I was a post-doctoral fellow there for that stretch of time in the early 1990s. It was in San Antonio. I’ve always said that if you absolutely must live in Texas, San Antone is a good place to do it. When I was there, SA was very much a military town with Army and Air Force bases and a lot of military retirees. Today the 4 bases are part of what is called Joint Base San Antonio comprised of Randolph Air Force Base, Fort Sam Houston, Lackland Air Force Base and Camp Bullis. A building at Randolph was called the Taj Mahal. It stood out.

Taj Mahal or Building 100 at Randolph AFB in San Antonio, TX. Photo Source: Wikipedia.

A friend who was retired from USAF as a bird colonel flew the delta-wing Corvair B-58 Hustler supersonic nuclear bomber for the Strategic Air Command (SAC) early in his service. As a military retiree he worked as a “Mr. Fixit” for the chemistry and physics departments at our university. One day, he took me to a Lackland AFB hangar to see a B-58 under restoration. My photos are lost to the sands of time, but they had made a good bit of progress by then. Pictures do not really convey the size of this beast.

Corsair B-58 Hustler. Source: Wikipedia. The external tank holding fuel and a nuclear weapon is visible below the fuselage.

The B-58 had no internal bomb bay so the early version had an external pod partitioned to carry both fuel and a nuclear weapon. Later versions had 4 hardpoints under the wing enabling it to carry up to 5 weapons. The Mach 2 aircraft could sustain supersonic flight and altitudes up to 50,000 to 70,000 feet with a crew of 3. The delta wing offered more storage volume for internal systems and fuel.

The downsides of the aircraft were serious. Reportedly it was difficult to fly and imposed a high workload on the crew. To sustain supersonic flight, high fuel consumption required frequent midair refueling. The aircraft was designed for high altitude, supersonic penetration of enemy airspace. But when the Soviets came up with high altitude surface-to-air missiles, the mission altitude had to be lowered, resulting in lower range. It was also expensive, costing more than the B-52 Stratofortress. Due to cost and obsolescence the aircraft was retired in 1970 after a short 10-year service and was replaced by the F-111.

We left that hangar at Lackland and went into another that had a WWI vintage Thomas-Morse biplane stored there. The engine was of the fixed crankshaft, rotating engine block rotary engine variety. It had no throttle in the modern sense by feeding a fuel/air mixture with a single adjustment. Power was regulated by cutting the ignition with the “blip switch” occasionally, especially on approach to landing, or by adjusting the fuel valve back to a preset position, then adjusting the air flow. Using the blip switch was faster but resulted in fuel and engine oil building up in the cylinders. Somehow this leads to gas and oil leakage and serious engine fires. Because the larger piston block was spinning rather than the crankshaft, engineering a normally carbureted fuel/air mixture was not possible at the time. To adjust the power, a predetermined fuel flow was chosen and then the air was adjusted through a flap valve to vary the power. It wasn’t a beginner’s aircraft.

Thomas-Morse S-4C. The aircraft I saw looked similar to this photo but the model number is long lost in the mists of time. Source: Wikipedia

What a Thing to See

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Who would have guessed that the voters of America would elect someone like Trump- twice? Now this guy is saying that he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America or something similar. He is also making a lot of noise about annexing Canada as the 51st state, taking back the Panama Canal, and “buying” Greenland. His rationale is that it is for ‘national security’. He and his top supporters seem very positive about Vlad Putin and Victor Orban, but down on the EU and NATO. The nut wants to halt aid to Ukraine in its defense from Putin’s Special Military Operation. Does he see the importance of stopping Putin? I don’t think he cares.

Writer Tony Schwartz who “co-wrote” the 1987 memoir Trump: The Art of the Deal published in a 2016 article by Jane Mayer said that that-

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” The Atlantic, Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All, Jane Mayer, July 18, 2016.

Some are speculating that a change in the world order is in the offing, so perhaps Trump wants in on it. Both Russia and China have expressed their desire to relieve the US of its hegemony role in the world. Whatever it is that Trump is planning, his words are suggestive of his past job as a real estate developer looking for property to acquire. He is renowned for a tough bargaining stance and his business history has shown that standing tough and using lawyers as battering rams is key to his success.

The explanation I’m left with when writing to an international audience is that half the adult population of the US is considerably less educated than many of us understood. While many of us were trying to achieve and grow in the 21st century, a great many citizens were decades behind and woefully undereducated for the times. Millions of people didn’t realize that a 12th grade education wouldn’t be nearly enough to weather the times and grow with civilization. They placed their bets on physical labor as a lifestyle and not even training for one of the better trades. Whereas low paying jobs may have been sufficient at one time for getting by, the cost of living in all of its dimensions inflated beyond them.

Many citizens in the MAGA population find themselves near or at retirement age with little savings after a hard life of low paying work. Add the high cost of American health care later in life and they realize they are cornered. In their minds the promise of American success has excluded them. But it’s not just in their minds. Opportunity sailed by them in the middle of the night with many job descriptions that required knowledge and skills they didn’t know they needed. They were toiling to stay afloat and unaware of the opportunities that further education or training could bring. Many are now deeply resentful of those more educated or just luckier people who found a greater piece of prosperity in changing times. Trump’s populist message rings true to them.

Ethnic Cleansing

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Here is the definition of ethnic cleansing provided by Wikipedia.

Ethnic cleansing is the systematic forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area, with the intent of making the society ethnically homogeneous. Along with direct removal such as deportation or population transfer, it also includes indirect methods aimed at forced migration by coercing the victim group to flee and preventing its return, such as murder, rape, and property destruction.[1][2][3][4][5] Both the definition and charge of ethnic cleansing is often disputed, with some researchers including and others excluding coercive assimilation or mass killings as a means of depopulating an area of a particular group.[6][7][8]

Maybe the US is truly concerned about the legality of the millions of illegal aliens within its borders and nothing else. Shipping them out of the country would be an act of law enforcement then. While the GOP members who are spearheading the upcoming mass deportation may be following the letter of the law, the broken laws pertaining to their supreme leader, a felon actually, are easily overlooked. He is more good than bad I suppose.

Given the well-known animus towards those not of European decent, is it just a coincidence that Americans are deporting a very, very large number of them? Certainly, the majority of those to be deported could be identified as coming from a different culture than ours- you know, obese, ignorant and cynical Americans. And, those from Central and South America are likely to be a bit tanner colored than common specimens of the pasty white American couch potato. This alone makes them easier to apprehend.

My guess is that once the Trump manhunt is underway, a place to concentrate them will be necessary. It will have to be a lock-up sort of place because we can’t have them just walking away. A remote location because the NIMBY reflex will not allow them near population centers. I’m thinking the concentrating camps will be along the US-Mexico border.

If we decide to bus them, will Mexico cooperate by allowing the buses into their country? If we fly them, will the Mexican authorities allow the planes to land? And if they do, will they be allowed to deplane and enter passport control? Or will they be denied entry at this point, passport or not? Final question: can they keep the air miles?

If they don’t ship them out right away, how long before the camps become an apartheid situation?

Look at all of the awful words I’ve used- ethnic cleansing, concentrating camp and apartheid. And, all in the context of America, land of the free and home of the brave, and … all men are created equal …

This is not the America I remember going to school in. Half of the electorate has put in place a despicable wannabe dictator and felon plus a republican guard of rabid elected followers. This is a moral disfigurement of the United States of America. Somebody put a drop cloth over the Statue of Liberty until this is over. It’s embarrassing.

This solution of deportation of millions of illegal immigrants certainly has the stink of ethnic cleansing to me. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope so.