For decades a population of Americans citizens have been extremely vocal about the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution and their right to bear arms. A major element to their argument is to have protection from a tyrannical government. Legislation carrying even the faintest whiff of what they spit out as “gun control” is defeated. But, that is an issue for another day.
In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court held that the Second Amendment codifies a natural right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. That right to self-defense extends to both private and public threats, including self-defense against agents of a tyrannical government. Source: Google.
Well, what if that tyrannical government is now materializing? Will they even recognize it? So far it doesn’t look like it. This population is heavily invested in Trump so could that possibly blind them to the situation? Or did they just shrug and sign up to work for ICE in large numbers?
Trump and his cronies are constantly presuming authority over many areas of government that were statutorily or constitutionally understood to be outside the grasp of the executive. These people are constantly flooding the zone with acts of overreach backed by a republican SCOTUS and congress and enjoy a corrupt DoJ, DHS and, increasingly, a politicized DoD.
What does the term “liberal democracy” really mean? From Wikipedia-
Anyone who made it through 9th grade civics should have a background sufficient to realize that liberal democratic America is in existential danger. Not by violent overthrow but by a slow, painless slouch to illiberal democracy. A slouch because not enough voters will engage with money, votes or the gumption to step out and take a public stand against what is happening. A majority still have utilities, access to health care and safe neighborhoods and roads. So far the changes are rather abstract and distant for most citizens and it is easy to conclude that nothing personally serious is happening.
The US Constitution appears inadequate to provide a clear and muscular remedy against an abusive and malevolent single party control of all three houses of government. The Dems have had such control in the past, but did not seek to form an oligarchy or some dictatorial power grab. Were they just too dumb and timid to even try or is there something else? Maybe they know better.
In this country the Republicans have most of the lawyers, guns and money. But we woke liberals also have the 2nd Amendment at our disposal as well.
The reliable American MAGA/GOP fear machine shifted into overdrive on the Bad Bunny halftime show during the recent Super Bowl. Against the blinding glare of Trump’s never-ending stream of foul blather stands the latest upsurge of Christian puritanical indignation and accusations of unspeakable depravities freely broadcast over the public airwaves. A group of “conservative warriers” have been orchestrating a war dance from the corridors of Congress out into the MAGA world. Their legislative blunderbuss tactics and shrill accusations and are aimed at Bad Bunny, NBC, and the NFL.
The NFL and NBC stand accused by red state dullards of broadcasting “openly glorified sodomy and countless other unspeakable depravities.” The MAGA populist movement is a jealous and cantankerous mob, intolerant of competing populist stirrings including pop music stars. Roger Goodell, National Football League (NFL) commissioner, enthusiastically backed the selection of Bad Bunny according to Time. This was not a trick foisted on the NFL.
Opposition began after the announcement of the half-time entertainment lineup in 2025. Much of the backlash focused on Bad Bunny’s Puerto Rican identity and his status as a Spanish speaker, with Fox News and political commentators framing the choice as anti-American.
The truly unwholesome aspect here is the extent to which American politics promotes and elects such Christian nationalist puritans to high office. Though politicians play to their home districts, their nationalist puritanical claims are broadcast widely, banking authority and credibility into their castle keep. Their words are cheap and easy to speak, but practically impossible to correct or refute. With Bible in one hand and the other reaching skyward in supplication, the sobbing preacher-man reads a verse and proclaims fealty to the invisible almighty and the President. It is at once moving and ridiculous. They know precisely what they are doing.
The Christian nationalist cult is intent on moving the US into a position where the rule of law is based on Biblical law, whatever that may be. Whatever it is, it will certainly place preachers into high-ranking, high-power positions of influence. If you listen to the TV preachers, they call for ‘Gods people’ to save America. All that matters is accelerating the return of the Savior to earth to trigger the end of times and banishment of the unworthy to a lake of molten sulfur.
I wonder if Biblical law would continue with parking tickets or tax law? If you wanted to change the easement on your property, would that be New or Old Testament, and would pastor Bob approve it?
In an effort to understand just what the hell is the deal with Russia, I enrolled in a university extension school spring semester course to study Eastern European history as it relates to capitalism and communism. It concerns the interwar period between WWI and WWII and why Eastern Europe adopted Soviet-style communism. Being from central USA, I’m familiar with much of the two world wars but only to the extent focused on histories written from the western allies’ viewpoint. This is the normal condition for most Americans.
Western European history, arbitrarily dating back to the Romans, is highly complex in the sense that the entire western Eurasian land mass has been repeatedly settled, conquered, and partitioned into empires, kingdoms, and duchies. The inevitable intermingling of cultures, languages, trade, and military might has combined to paint the map of today. Coastal nations had the advantage of access to fisheries and trade across long distances. On the downside, however, coasts were subject to easy invasion and wars of conquest.
This wall is covered and overprinted with diverse messages. So too is the Eurasian landmass overprinted with fragmented, missing and overlapping cultural and political domains over the last several millennia.
Much of Eastern Europe retains a strong Slavic ethnic identity. Along with the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church still holds a strong position in many regions, including Russia. Putin even has the cooperation of the Eastern Orthodox Church in his effort to promote his agenda and propaganda at all levels in Russia.
In addition to Slavic and other ethnic identities, Eastern Europe and Russia have been isolated from much of the world by distance, economics, and the high level of modernism that Western Europe embraced. Tsar Peter the Great was aware of the more advanced nature of Western Europe and spent time there in order to gather ideas for modernizing Russia, particularly in the area of naval ships.
The landlocked or nearly landlocked nations of Eastern Europe lacked ice-free, warm water ports, not just limiting trade and shipbuilding but also economic exchange with more distant parts of the world. The Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, England, Rome, Portugal, and Spain in particular, established distant colonies and trade, generating wealth and power. With wealth, a kingdom acquires military strength and the ability to project power and conquest in resource-rich territories within just months or weeks of sailing time.
Conquest and the material wealth it brought was critical not only for an empire or monarchy to maintain or expand its holdings but also for self-defense from marauding armies looking for their own conquest. The various kingdoms, duchies, and empires were not entirely independent entities. The custom of the royal families to intermarry across empires and kingdoms assured continuity of the ruling families and wealth in the royal houses. This familial connection led to many alliances and specific choices in dividing up land.
The question of “what’s the deal with Russia” is about how it came to be that Russia is remote and standoffish to the point of being endlessly hostile and paranoid about the West. To American eyes like mine, the attitude Russia has about the West is peculiar and originates from … what? Even if Russia did not suffer overland invasions by Napoleon and Hitler, would they be any less paranoid? They would have less historical invasion baggage to drag along in some ways, but would other tragedies have befallen them? Impossible to say. It is fair to say that the Bolsheviks were keen on global-scale revolution and widespread implementation of Soviet socialism. They were not without imperialistic enthusiasm themselves.
President Putin continues to press the rhetorical but incendive argument about how the West is desirous of their resources. It is pitched as a clear and present danger to Russia. The West, he intimates, is crawling with greedy and perverted imperialists who want nothing more than to steal Mother Russia’s oil & gas, minerals, uranium, and timber. Any leader in any country could get mileage from this argument, and Vladdy-buck is pumping this handle with gusto.
The main thesis of my history class is that had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, the spread of Soviet conquest to its western frontier would not have happened. I’ll write more as this topic unfolds in class.
In my industrial career as a PhD organic/organometallic chemist I was kept busy for about 10 years with in-house Reaction Calorimetry (RC), Accelerating Rate Calorimetry (ARC), Differential Scanning Calorimetry (DSC) as well as Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) for validating thermal process safety. To institutionalize this I was asked to start a process safety department and began standardizing experimental protocols and a database for the results. I was able to scour the internet for thermochemical papers, looking for mentions of energetic properties. As always, much can be learned by just looking around.
Thermal process safety refers to safe operation of chemical manufacturing in regard to the generation of heat in a reaction mass and the hazards arising therein. The hazards from uncontrolled self-heating include acceleration of reaction kinetics producing accelerating heat and pressure evolution. If the reaction enthalpy and subsequent temperature rise theoretically exceeds the boiling point of the solvent despite the cooling jacket and the chilled condenser, then self-heating can lead to a boil up and uncontrolled ejection of the reaction mass. With insufficient cooling, the temperature will rise to the solvent bp and boil off the solvent first, carrying much heat away as heat of evaporation. Once most of the solvent has boiled away and if the reaction mass continues to self-heat, the temperature will continue to rise and peak at some undesired level as the reactants are consumed. Further heating of the now hot, highly concentrated reaction mass, potentially leading to successive reactions that may or may not be exothermic.
When a liquid phase reaction mass self-heats faster than heat can be removed, the reactor pressure will begin to rise. As pressure builds, the boiling point of the reaction mass begins to rise, slowing down the boil-off. A sudden drop in pressure, as with the burst of a rupture disk, will cause a superheated solution to promptly boil throughout the reaction mass. This means that flash vaporization can lead to bubble formation throughout the volume of the reaction mass producing a foam. The severity will depend on the pressure drop and the bp of the solvent. If the headspace is sufficiently small, the foam can expand rapidly and begin to exit through the vent pipe. A properly engineered vent pipe has been sized to vent gas/vapor at specified conditions. Since a foam is part liquid and part gas/vapor, it lacks the overall compressibility of a gas/vapor so the resulting foam flow may be lower than calculated for a gas/vapor, slowing the rate of depressurization.
The distinction between gas and a vapor is that a vapor may be condensable as with most solvent vapors, but evolved gases like hydrogen, methane or carbon dioxide will combine with a non-condensable blanket gas like nitrogen and resist condensation in the by the chiller. The point is that if one is relying on a chilled condenser to knock down non-condensable gases as a pressure management control, then a rude shock is headed your way, especially if the rupture disk bursting pressure is higher than need be.
Flow into vent pipes that exit outdoors may discharge hot reaction mass onto the roof or wherever the vent terminates. If the vent terminates into a knockdown drum or other catch vessel, the hot reaction mass contacts whatever may be in those vessels.
Image: Mettler Toledo. The Mettler-Toledo RC1 rigged for dual feed and distillation or reflux. The two brown bottles (lower right) sit on balances and feed from two reagent bottles into the reactor (lower left). The feed of liquid reactants is pre-programmed and is controlled quite accurately. Reagents are fed into an agitating reaction mass (yellow) while the temperature and enthalpy (H or h) are monitored on the fly. The instrument monitors the jacket and reactor temperatures and with the help of heat capacities, Cp, can display the enthalpy of the reaction as it proceeds.
Fortunately, the thermal profile leading up to the above scenario can be modeled in properly conducted RC1 experiments. But exactly what can be done beforehand?
First, let’s realize that the total self-heating temperature rise can be measured. We add that ΔT (temperature rise) to the proposed reaction temperature Tr and get a maximum temperature of the synthetic reaction, MTSR. Once we have this, if the MTSR is greater than the bp of the solvent(s), then we know that an uncontained runaway is possible. What to do then?
R&D needs to justify the problematic low boiling solvent with the reaction temperature to be applied.
R&D needs to provide input on lowering the design reaction temperature.
Is a lower Tr for a longer reaction time feasible?
How sensitive is the reaction to a higher bp solvent substitution?
If the chosen solvent conveniently forces side or waste products to precipitate and be removed by filtration, then we have the conundrum of safety vs efficient processability.
The magnitude of the hazard in the minds of everyone involved may be quite different and will require a documented decision process. Engineering input here is invaluable.
Thermal runaway profile. Source. The linked article is well written.
Tp Process Temperature
ΔTad Adiabatic Temperature rise
MTSR Maximum Temperature of the Synthetic Reaction
TMRad Adiabatic Time to Maximum Rate
Tx Time of Cooling Loss
What if the design solvent is truly required for a feasible and economic process? This needs to be discussed first with chemists and engineers in the room and a decision rendered. If chemist input says no solvent change is desirable or economic, the engineers need to speak up as to whether there is an engineering work around. If a ready engineering work around is not feasible and the product is still important, then the chemists need to be challenged to find procedure that denies the equipment a runaway condition.
If we’re lucky, a partial batch reaction method can be used wherein the reactor is charged with solvent and most of the reactant compounds are in the vessel at the beginning of the run. The final reactant is slowly fed into the reactor and the reaction temperature is controlled by the feed rate. Reaction calorimetry can be used to arrive at a plausible maximum feed rate that is fast but not too fast. A reaction calorimeter is basically a chemical reaction detector and can be used to look for an approximate reaction onset temperature. Remember that onset temperature is not a physical or chemical property. It depends on the detection equipment and the rate of heating.
Like everything else, success can depend on first asking the right questions. On the graphic computer display of the RC1, you can determine the response to an aliquot of reagent addition. Does the heat production, q, rise promptly with addition or does it lag? If there is a lag or a latency, it means that over-charging by operators at scale can happen if they are looking for a prompt “heat kick” on addition of the feed.
The RC1 can also show the length of time to react away the feed or what the total reaction time may be If the reaction has a natural response lag, then a defined charge mass is called for. A response lag may also be due to the presence of water which must first be quenched under the reaction conditions. The most insidious situation is when the feed reactant accumulates in the reactor over the course of the reaction. This is very difficult to judge by the operators. The feed may accumulate until the reaction suddenly begins and accelerates out of control. This is not uncommon.
Finally, a proper “batch reaction” is one in which all of the reactants are loaded into the reactor all at once, the temperature is adjusted and the reaction begins. It is critical that before a new batch reaction is allowed, the chemists must show that this will not result in a runaway condition. This is where reaction calorimetry shines. The safety of a batch reaction is reproduced in the RC1and the progress is monitored. The RC1 can also be used to explore various reaction conditions to see if runaway potential can be easily blundered into. How narrow are the safe operating parameters? Many plant incidents happen at shift changes where the continuity of watchfulness may diverge for a time, even with automation.
TMRad Adiabatic Time to Maximum Rate
A very informative piece of data to have is the TMR- Time to Maximum Rate. This can be obtained by an Accelerated Rate Calorimeter or ARC. The instrument consists of a furnace into which is placed a sample “can” which can be made of metal or glass. The furnace raises the sample temperature gradually using a heat-wait-search (HWS) method searching for an onset temperature.
Once an onset temperature is found, the HWS is automatically halted and the furnace keeps adjusting its temperature to match the rising internal sample temperature. If the internal sample temperature and the exterior furnace temperature are the same, then the sample is under adiabatic conditions and no heat flows in or out of the sample can. The sample temperature is driven by self heating only.
Knowing the sample mass and the best guess at Cp, constant pressure heat capacity, the reaction enthalpy can be determined. From the data, the Time to Maximum Rate (TMR) can be calculated to give an equation. It is the time that a substance that is self-reacting takes to reach the maximum rate of heat output as a function of sample temperature. The instrument also records sample pressure. If the sample pressure does not return to ambient pressure at room temperature, this would mean that a non-condensable gas was evolved.
Image of the Phi-Tec II ARC system. from H.E.L. company. My ARC experience is with this model.
A typical ARC experiment took me from 6 to 24 hours to complete the HWS routine.
What TMR data allows one to do is to find a reaction temperature the reaches maximum rate in 24 hours or more. You plug in a temperature and you get a TMR. The temperature needed to produce a TMR of 24 hours is considered by many in industry to be the uppermost safe processing temperature. It helps to answer what the maximum safe temperature in which a solid can be dried before decomposition begins.
To outsource safety testing or not
First and foremost, a commercial safety test lab understands and uses procedures that are agreed upon and standardized. Also, if down the road there comes a related event, your response to criticism will be to refer to the test lab experts, not some ham fisted employee monkeying around in the lab doing improvised experiments. Certain safety matters should be referred to the commercial lab experts for valid results and for CYA. This applies especially to energetic materials like nitroaromatics or nitrate esters.
Chemical manufacturing is conducted at many scales from laboratory gram scale products for R&D, multi-kilogram kilo-lab batch processing to the colossal commodity scale continuous manufacturing of petrochemicals, agrichemicals, polymers, flavors & fragrances, and pharmaceuticals. Nearly all of these commodity chemicals and polymers are well known and have safety issues related only to flammability, exposure and dose.
Outsourcing tests that can be done inhouse is a missed opportunity to accumulate more skills which is company treasure. I’m speaking of calorimetry. Calorimeters can be brought on-site and meshed in with research and development. Just learning how to interpret thermograms alone brings workers new insights into their chemistry.
What is best for your company? In-house safety testing or outsourced safety testing? Like nearly everything else in life, the answer depends on the situation. If you need to survey for explosive hazards for the first time, there are several competent commercial labs available that will use standard protocols. My experience is that they employ just engineers or a mix of chemists and engineers. They conduct standard testing protocols wherein a series of samples are exposed step-wise to a series of ever increasing stimuli intensity to find the boundary conditions of sensitivity to various stimuli, like heat, friction, impact, dust explosion parameters, burn tests, static charge lifetimes and minimum ignition energy (MIE) with electrostatic discharge.
Explosibility testing
Sensitivity to explosive behavior is tested in numerous ways to flesh out the sensitivity profile. Testing is performed in stages where the least intense stimuli are tried first to screen for highly sensitive substances. The results of any single test run are graded as ‘Go/No Go’ or ‘positive/negative’. The terms ‘Go’ or ‘Negative’ mean that an explosive property was observed.
Part of explosives testing is finding out what kinds of stimuli lead to initiation of an explosion. The Bureau of Mines (BOM) drop weight test looks for the maximum safe impact energy. There is a friction test, an electrostatic discharge test, and many others. If the sample does not give a Go result at the maximum machine impact or friction, then it is regarded as safe under those precise conditions. In the BOM test, the higher the number (in drop distance of a 5 or 10 kg weight), the more stable it is to impact.
You get the testing data. Now what?
Now how do you take numerical test data and convert it to safer operations? This is where engineers can be most useful. Imagine a substance that has a 34 inch BOM drop weight result with a 10 kg anvil. Will any process equipment mash down on the substance inadvertently? Put this ball in the court of engineers and let them chew on it. This data moves workers closer to confidence in safety.
Outsourcing safety testing and explosive screening can lead to a conundrum. Outsourcing anything means that certain expertise may not be internalized for your company’s use, the user or manufacturer. Commercial labs will absolutely not comment on how the material can be safely used, whether or not it is too dangerous or nominally safe under your use conditions. Safe use is not an endorsement they will make, they will only stand behind their results from standard testing protocols. I’d do the same.
Before safety testing you were alone. Now, with safety data, you are still alone but with numbers. Engineers and plant operators are invaluable in locating equipment that delivers impacts or friction. They can also help to identify non-grounded equipment that may generate or accumulate electrostatic charge. Always get the plant people involved.
It didn’t take long to realize that if we sent samples out to commercial labs for calorimetry testing, the samples were subjected to unfamiliar standard test methodology. Early on it was fascinating to see what kind of experimental setups were used and what the results looked like. Being a synthesis chemist I was unfamiliar with calorimetry. My earlier exposure to calorimetry was limited to what appeared in molecular dynamics and mechanics modeling. Acquiring actual data on reaction enthalpies and onset conditions myself awakened a fascination that carried me far into reaction calorimetry and thermochemistry.
What was not clear at the outset of receiving external calorimetric, electrostatic and explosive test data was what to do with it. Using external hazard data to inform operational procedure was new to everyone. Yes, we could learn from an ARC experiment what temperature the onset to a runaway condition begins, but how to use the measurements in practice wasn’t always obvious.
Incidents have three phases- initiation, propagation and termination. You have to ask this: if an incident initiates, what is the preferred propagation direction to termination? Yes, this can be controlled somewhat but only in advance. For instance, if an explosion happens, what is the least terrible direction for the blast to go? These matters should be considered in the design phase of construction of a chemical facility. If they weren’t, then decisions must be made despite the lack of preplanning.
As an example, a commercial explosives company I’m aware of built their manufacturing facility out in the European countryside. Explosive materials were prepared, stored and handled in small buildings distributed over a large area with distance, berms and trees separating them. If an explosion happened, the blast wave would be isolated from other assets and attenuated by distance, berms and forest. Here, the propagation phase was suppressed by distance and topography.
Another explosion highlights the folly of not segregating manufacturing operations. A plant manufacturing a hydroxylamine called HOBT suffered a catastrophic incident where a reactor blew apart explosively during a process previously performed many times. The reactor was housed in a structure that had expanded over time by adding manufacturing space by piecemeal addition as needed. This resulted in a building that was a rabbits warren of rooms and hallways even including admin space. The explosion did not just happen without warning. The reactor began to overheat from accumulating heat of reaction and became unresponsive to cooling efforts by the operator. As the operator turned to go get help, the reactor exploded sending parts up and out of the building, with the agitator landing on the roof of an adjacent business and onto railroad tracks. Heat transfer oil ran out of the building and flowing into the nearby river. The operator was blown through a sheet rock wall but survived. The shock wave propagated into adjacent spaces and down hallways, blowing out windows, internal and external doors including overhead doors.
The sad thing is that another plant suffered a devastating explosion 20 years earlier making the same hydroxylamine product. Perhaps lessons were learned at this plant, but those lessons didn’t to the other plant.
The lesson is clear. In chemical manufacture the R&D folks must be sure that all chemical properties are well understood and such knowledge is a part of accessible in-house expertise. If there is no R&D, meaning that a large scale procedure is simply written up and performed without the scrutiny of cold expert eyes evaluating it, then you are stepping onto a high wire without a net. Both plants making the hydroxylamine had experienced chemists on site and performed the procedure without incident many, many times. Even then, incidents happened but how many incidents were averted by expert judgement? We’ll never know.
Experience
Let’s talk about experience. Career chemists are like everyone else- they may have accumulated years of experience. Some of the learning’s a person has accumulated are captured in writing and available to staff. Other learning’s reside in a person’s head only and are perhaps regarded as ‘obvious’. Or the serious hazards are actually disclosed on the Safety Data Sheet which was filed away without scrutiny. Knowledge of explosibility of a particular substance could be too narrow by virtue of time and obscurity to serve as walking around knowledge by many chemists. Some of us are accustomed to spotting explosive functional groups (explosophores) on a molecule but many are not.
For some individuals, their 18 years of experience is better described as 6 years repeated twice, or worse. Years of experience should always imply years of continuous improvement.
The main reason that process safety was a separate department was to prevent production and R&D from having vested interest in how test measurement results were interpreted and used or ignored. If calorimetric data suggests that a particular process reaction can run away or if a reaction should be initiated and run at a lower temperature, managers personally responsible for productivity may object owing to increased plant time or lower processing yields. This is especially problematic if prior experience has never shown a hint of a hazard, yet. Or, incidents in the past were not taken seriously or properly understood. The phrase “we’ve always done it this way” can be a very difficult barrier to overcome. And even if overcome, can revert back to the old practices over time.
This forces management to deal with safety margins and acceptable risk. They should automatically understand that zero risk is not possible. However, they may look back over the production history and not realize that they spent too much time near the edge of disaster.
Unknown risks
Imagine wearing a blindfold while standing 2 meters from the rim of the Grand Canyon. Someone turns you around a few times to scramble your senses. Now, even while not knowing the location of the rim, it is possible to walk around blindfolded and not go over the edge. You could do this for a short or a long time period and not fall in. Slowly you begin to doubt the hazard is real since you have not gone over the edge. Soon the risk is forgotten in the frenzy to reduce costs. Then one day you fall into the canyon and on the way down you muse about your own folly.
I hope that peoples of the world understand that America’s president, Mr. Trump, is mightily disliked in the US and his opposition is only growing. His behavior at Davos in particular was humiliating for a growing majority of my countrymen. On behalf of the millions of Trump opponents, please understand that this won’t last forever and that we regret that our friends and allies have been exposed to this blithering idiot.
The Republican party has surrounded him in exchange for political protection and votes, but lately Republican congresspeople have been jumping off the MAGA barge like rats in a fire. While he crosses over every red line and is excused by his party, the rest of the country is obeying the laws and norms of our national heritage. While he wreaks havoc on everything he touches, he tries to rule by decree. This is dictator behavior.
Alienating America’s friends and NATO allies while threatening annexation of sovereign nations can only be the work of a greedy and deeply ignorant man. On top of that he fancies that certain dictators in the world are his friends. His voters were primarily interested in a candidate who would “kick ass and take names”. They wanted someone who could eliminate what they called the “deep state”. Trump has a persistent group of about 1/3 of the conservative voters who support him through thick and thin, but they don’t sound very educated.
Now the hidden brainwaves working in the Trump White House have dreamed up the idea of the “Board of Peace“. Accepted are the countries of UAE, Bahrain, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Morocco and Vietnam have already signed up. Rootin’ tootin’ Putin too.
It is plain to see that the American Constitution is inadequate for this and other circumstances. What if he is removed by the 25th Amendment but refuses to acknowledge it? His executive branch controls the major law enforcement agencies. If they refuse to remove Trump from office, who will do it? Foremost is needed a mechanism for the physical removal of a president from the White House and confiscation of the nuclear codes that follow him. Such authority and mechanism should be defined in the US Constitution. The current US Supreme Court’s conservative majority has adopted a legal theory called “originalism” at least since Justice Scalia’s time.
This philosophy seeks to limit interpretation of the Constitution to the language and meanings as well as the original intent of the 18th century document. In other words, it is frozen in time. Nobody believes that another amendment to the constitution will be supported by the required number of states. America needs a living document relating to 21st century American life.
Trump has an Edifice Complex. Apologies to Sigmond Freud.
Vice President JD “Gilligan” Vance is next in the line of succession and his inclinations as the next president are unclear. Ok, so we get rid of Trump only to have Gilligan take his place. Will he mindlessly continue the efforts of Trump”? Stay tuned.
I’ve joined the migration away from Windows 11 specifically and Microsoft (MS) generally. The last few posts on this site were written from a Linux Ubuntu system. Whereas my Windows 11 machine became incompatible with the WordPress editor used to write this blog, my switch to Linux has gotten around this. It is unlikely that the issue was not a Windows 11 problem per se so much as a setting being changed somehow. I was unable to find such a setting.
In short, MS has gotten increasingly greedy not just in cash flow but also in their built-in machinations for automatic scraping of data from users. Its insistence on cloud storage and AI features seems to be based on a business model intent on monetizing every facet of a user’s activity. Superficially, monetization of features the customers value is just normal business strategy. What MS has been doing over time might be called creeping featurism. Product improvement is a competitive act by a manufacturer but also justifies price increases when a revised product is released, if the market allows it.
Alas. Microsoft’s cash cow is dying. Without planned obsolescence, whatever will Microsoft do? Poor miserable buggers.
MS has forced users to deal with Co-Pilot and to upgrade their older computers due to equipment upgrades required by Windows 11. In the past MS users have complied with the requirements of Windows (n+1) for the most part. But the jump to Windows 11 is different.
World wide, there is backlash to MS Windows 11 and data security is no small part of it. South Korea has banned it outright for government use. China, Brazil, the EU, and even Japan are backing off of Windows 11. US corporations are reevaluating going forward with Windows.
My main beef with Windows 11 is that decades of my muscle memory accumulated using Windows OS and MS Office apps has been disrupted. Familiar features, especially in Outlook, continue to trip me up because the menus have been changed to where my keyboard habits refined over many years now work differently.
Windows now requires annual payments for continued use and access to records and documents.
I wish I could reciprocate with a similar inconvenience to MS.
I want to call out Canada’s prime minister Carney for his well crafted speech at the 2026 Davos World Economic Forum. Maybe Canada should annex the USA rather than the other way around.
It is painful, embarrassing and sickening to watch the Trump administration methodically driving our great country off the road and into the weeds of blatant unilateralism. Listening to the despicable White House aid Stephen Miller speaking about the need for the USA to exercise its strength by threatening the world with the Trump administration’s aims at conquest is deeply distressing.
The Trump problem in the USA stems from his ring of back room schemers and, most importantly, the voters who put him in power … twice. Many of us were surprised at the magnitude of MAGA discontent and anger at the status quo. The various polls I’ve seen show that of the fraction of voters responding, about 30 % support Trump consistently. The remaining Trump voters seem to think that he is tolerable and, by default, a less terrible choice than the Democratic candidate.
Not being a political scientist, sociologist, economist or anthropologist I must restrain myself from anything more than superficial commentary. That said, what strikes me is the gap between voter confidence and their grasp of the consequences of having Trump in high office. It appears that many voters possess a wildly insufficient education in civics and history. Instead, that knowledge void is packed with bullshit. Before the internet and instant access to news and opinion, the movement of news was through narrower channels that spread poorly. Controversies were more sluggish and mob mentalities perhaps slower to spread. Today there is a hair trigger on personal political opinion for a great many.
Today any individual with half-baked opinions can potentially incite unrest even at a great distance with fake news and recently with AI produced images. And energized with Christian nationalist ideology, people can cite supernatural powers to justify their insane political views. Political ideology justified by supernatural forces is impossible to reason with.
The people who have been complaining about the poor quality of American education were right all along. A third of the US population is unable to discern why Trump is a disaster for America and the huge hit our democracy is facing. This is largely an education problem and those adults so afflicted can be expected to carry their ignorance and poor judgement to their graves.The critical mass (of idiots) for this disaster is smaller than many of us thought. I am unable to fathom how this might be changed for the better.
Microsoft (MS) has gotten too big for its britches. Over time its wildly popular series of Windows upgrades has won over much of the world. For many years they successfully operated under a business model that said If you build it, they will come. The latest upgrade presents improved features that require some customers to get over their thrifty-hump and pay to upgrade their computers to Windows 11. This business model kept sales growth high and led everyone to believe that it would go on forever. After all, founder Bill Gates is a likeable folk hero whose appeal across the business and computing worlds seemed inexhaustible. But he is a tech guy, not a finance or marketing specialist. At some point most tech companies transition from tech driven to finance driven as they are taken over by the finance guys.
Numerous examples exist where a tech company goes from engineering focused to finance focused. Boeing is a recent example of an aerospace engineering culture transitioning to overriding concern for shareholder value in the form of quarterly stock prices. In the unceasing desire of the C-Suite to improve profits by cost cutting, Boeing apparently drifted a bit to far into the MBA’s fever dream of operating a finance engine. The 737 Max fiasco and their botching of the Artemis program is widely regarded as being due to drift of the company culture. Luckily, nobody has been killed in the Artemis program due to Boeing engineering failures … yet.
Another example of this is what Jack Welch did to General Electric Company (GE). His transformation of GE includes implementing a cut-throat culture. I’ll let readers visit the Wikipedia page for more details. Guys like Welch become demigods attracting hungry young business school graduates flocking to their pedestals hoping to glean savvy insights and secrets to become the next generation of masters of the universe. I can’t blame anyone for their enthusiasms and the desire to succeed, but bastardizing technology companies by conversion to finance companies is beyond the pale. When those who inhabit the rarefied air of the C-Suite are more concerned about their golden parachutes than the furtherance of their manufacturing ingenuity and quality, they should move on. When Jack Welch left GE, his severance package was $417 million.
I’m partway through switching to Linux Ubuntu from the home version of Windows 11. I just purchased an Asus laptop preloaded with Linux. Like most people I have a giant collection of pdf files as well as MS Word and Excel files. My understanding is that pdf files are easier to transfer to Linux and one of the better ways to deal with Word documents is to convert them to pdf.
MS Windows and MS Office were loaded with advanced features wildly beyond what any single user would need to use. These features were neatly organized in pull-down menus and manipulated with the click and drag of a mouse. This would allow users from casual to super-users to use a single package across a wide range of applications. No need to offer different versions across business, personal and scientific applications.
MS has been selling excess capacity from early on. It was part of the ballyhoo and razzle dazzle. Think about all of the objects you own that are packed with unneeded applications you’ll never use. I wonder how much of the US economy is spent on tools and widgets that have wasted utility.
The Windows operating system (OS) and MS’s package of office applications have provided a widely adopted template for business activity, games and home computing. The friendly and perhaps even inviting graphic user interface (GUI), facilitated by the mouse, put a buffer between the user and the stark command line input with no visual clues of what to do next. Windows applications were user friendly and forgiving of mistakenly used features.
Many feel that Windows 7 was the high point in this important series of products. It seems Microsoft is a victim of its own success. Once market penetration reached a certain level, the question becomes how to sustain sales, EBITDA and growth. Auto manufacturers solved this problem long ago by offering physically appealing cars that were new and improved each year. They often used successful models as a guide to improved design and performance. While not foolproof, this approach can work very well.
Switching from the Windows OS to the Linux OS is what I’m doing presently. I’ve been saving MS Word and Excel documents since the late 1990’s. The version, or “distro’, of Linux I’m using is Ubuntu. It has a Windows-like GUI except that there is a command-line feature that needs to be dealt with. Windows does too, but I’ve only seen IT folks dip into it to work their dark arts.
My impression is that Linux applications are not initially as feature rich as Windows but realize that the succession of Windows upgrades have been subject to creeping featurism from the beginning. Windows 11 has builtin spyware in addition to increased bloatware running in the background, bogging down computational speed. Allegedly the goal of MS is to apply Co-Pilot to use captured user data for the user’s search purposes. As of this writing Windows 11 market share at 31 %.
The Linux mentality is quite different. Generally, technology tends to improve in succeeding versions in order to stay competitive in the market. That evolution plus a new business model have led to the current Windows 11 fiasco. Older Computers that operated well on Windows 10 are suddenly inadequate for a drop-in replacement to Windows 11. People, businesses and governments are outraged by equipment upgrades needed to do what they did yesterday and consequently are dropping out of MS Windows all together. So alarmed is MS that it has even caused Bill Gates to be recalled from retirement to help brainstorm the sudden migration away from Windows.
MS has implemented artificial intelligence (AI) elements that are unwelcome to many users. MS blurts out that AI promises to improve efficiency for users. Every dog and cat out there is doing the same. AI is an economic bubble that many are trying tap into. Early adopters do the best in these bubbles.
MS has tumbled over the edge ofIf you build it, they will come. Furthermore, the annual subscription now in play is new to most individuals using Windows. Even worse, the sacrosanct space on your hard drive is not even safe from the MS mothership hovering overhead beaming up your information or plowing it into the cloud that you may consider confidential. Should some documents under Windows 11 be air gapped onto a thumb or disconnected external drive? Seems that way.
At a time when the Trump administration is making enemies in the EU with talk of a military adventure in Greenland, Putin has unleashed Oreshnik hypersonic intermediate range missiles at Ukrainian civilians. The targeting of civilians is nothing new for the Russians, but the Oreshnik missiles travel at up to Mach 10 (7610 mph) which makes shooting them down problematic. Russia has held back this missile system until now., though in 2024 it apparently had fired a test shot absent explosive warheads. According to Wikipedia the Oreshnik ballistic missile system is still in the experimental stage.
The Russians have gotten quite peevish lately, claiming that Ukraine targeted the sprawling home of Putin. Targeting civilians in Kyiv as well as Lviv in western Ukraine serves the dual purpose of reminding the NATO and the EU of the threat Russia poses to them. Golly. Imagine a warring state trying to decapitate the leader of its opponent. According to reports Russia has been trying to assassinate Zelinski, so a reciprocal decapitation effort should be expected.
While Russia burns through military resources and personnel, and while the Russian economy teeters on the edge of total collapse, the conventional military threat to Europe should weaken more by the day. They are taking roughly 1000 casualties per day while their recruitment effort is falling short of that number. However, the nuclear threat remains. It is an open question as to whether Putin refrains from releasing nuclear weapons as his tenure becomes endangered. The Oreshnik missile is capable of carrying multiple nuclear warheads- a fact that is lost on nobody.
It’s not in the nature of Putin or his Kremlin to admit even the slightest amount of damage or discomfort caused by Ukraine. One fine day the west will learn that Putin has disappeared and a successor has surfaced. What will Russia do then? A gesture of humanity, perhaps? That would be out of character. A Russian leader could never admit mistakes or defeat. Krushchev did it, but his tenure was cut short by the politburo with Brezhnev taking his place.
Not a single reader has asked about the photograph in the header of this blog, so I’ll save the many peoples of the world from having to ask. Mineral collecting has been a lifelong weakness of mine so there was no surprise when I bought the pink mineral in a rock shop in Leadville, Colorado. The pinkish mineral in the sample is rhodochrosite, the state mineral of Colorado. Like most samples, it comes from the now-closed Sweet Home Mine, a failed silver mine in Buckskin Gulch outside of Alma, CO, between Breckenridge and Fairplay. If you are ever in Denver with spare time on your hands, the mineral collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science has a stunning collection on display of rhodochrosite from the Sweet Home Mine.
Source: Google Maps. Location of Sweet Home Mine outside of Alma, Colorado.
To get to the site take gravel road 8 from Alma up Buckskin Gulch which eventually terminates at a trailhead near the base of several fourteeners in the Mosquito Range. We once tried to find the mine by driving up the gulch above Alma, but there were no signs identifying the mine.
Source: Google earth. Location of Sweet Home Mine in Buckhorn Canyon.
While we did not positively identify the mine on our trip, a photograph (below) was found later of a building associated with the mine. We did see it but sailed right on by. The mine is located on private property so wandering around the site is not permitted.
Source: Facebook. The famous Alma King rhodochrosite specimen with museum dudes for scale.
Source: personal specimen purchased at a rock shop in Leadville, CO. The rhodochrosite section is placed next to manganese on the periodic table just because it looked cool. The gold-colored bits on the specimen are likely chalcopyrite.
The mining district was discovered in the usual way- the search for placer metals like gold led miners up Buckskin Creek into the gulch looking for the source of the lode deposit. Originally a silver mining claim was made in 1873. The sporadic silver mining operation was abandoned in 1966. In 1991 the mine was bought out by Collector’s Edge Minerals, a consortium, and modernized. After a period of activity, the Sweet Home Mine was closed in 2004. However, another mine called the Detroit City Portal was begun by Collectors Edge on nearby Mt. Bross in 2016. This new operation, yielding many fine specimens was finally closed in September of 2024.
Source: Mindat.org. Looking north towards the Sweet Home Mine and what appears to be Mt Democrat on horizon.
“Mineralization is generally in base metal-silver-rhodochrosite-fluorite veins predominately hosted by meta-igneous and metamorphic rocks, with minor mineralization in porphyritic dikes and pegmatites. There are five main veins in descending order of production: the Main, Tetrahedrite, Watercourse, Blaine and Blue Mud veins. The Blue Mud Vein is a barren post-mineralization fault-vein, and production from the Blaine Vein was minor. Overall, the planned extent of the mine is small (1000 feet x 400 feet) with about 5,000 feet of workings, and the overall hydrothermal alteration zone small, despite evidence of on-strike continuation of the veins in the collapsed Tanner Boy workings directly across Buckskin Gulch. And even within a vein, rhodochrosite finds were limited.”
“Three conditions were responsible for the formation of vugs: (1) changes in strike and dip of veins, (2) vein intersections, and (3) openings formed by fault bends controlled by host rock foliation. In general, the 2nd condition was responsible for major pockets, and the 3rd for most smaller pockets. Exploration focused on fault/vein intersections. Fluid inclusion studies suggest that the hottest fluid flow produced the gemmiest ruby-red rhodochrosites.” Minedat.org
Deposits found in the mine result from mineral-saturated hydrothermal fluids moving from the mineral source-rock into faults and fractures in the formation that were cooler, leading to precipitation of the minerals. The large size of the rhodochrosite crystals in the museum collection suggests that the precipitation was gradual.
According to Minedat.org, after the buyout of the Sweet Home Mine by Collector’s Edge Minerals and subsequent modernization, ground penetrating radar was used to survey for vugs. According to the AI overview by Google in a search for “vugs”-
Vugs are- “small to medium-sized hollow spaces or cavities within rocks, often lined with beautiful, well-formed crystals like quartz or calcite, formed by mineral-rich fluids filling natural voids left by dissolution, tectonic shifts, or gas bubbles in volcanic rocks, prized by collectors for their exposed crystal formations.”
Only makes sense, right? Liquids within voids in the rock have the opportunity for crystals to grow into. Vugs are associated with faults and fractures which can be filled with hydrothermal fluids within a formation. Lode gold, silver, lead, etc., as well as quartz may line or even fill the vug. This is why some of the best mineral crystals are only found in mines and this certainly applies to rhodochrosite. Rhodochrosite contains manganese (II) which is oxidizable to a higher, more positive oxidation state, so protection from atmospheric oxygen deep within a rock formation prevents decomposition of the mineral.
Crystallographic structures of rhodochrosite are shown below-
Source: Mindat.org. A view of the crystal structure rotated to see the planar arrangement of Manganese (2+) in purple and carbonate anions (2-) in grey and red.
Source: Minedat.org. In this view the alternating layers of carbonate anions (CO3 2-) delineating the carbon and oxygen atoms. The trigonal shape of carbonate can be seen.
Below is a representation of the unit cell with atom labels. Clear images are tricky with crystal structures. Overlapping features are hard to avoid.
Source: Minesdat.org. The labeled unit cell of rhodochrosite. Partial carbonate structures can be seen contributing to the unit cell.
Rhodochrosite is manganese (II) carbonate, MnCO3, and is insoluble in water but as a metal carbonate it is acid sensitive and therefore subject hydrolysis or chemical or microbial oxidation to Mn(III) or Mn(IV). Like a great many common ionic substances, it is not regarded as suitable for jewelry applications because it is not comprised of silicate or aluminum silicate subunits common in semiprecious and more robust minerals like sapphire, beryl or garnet. The structure is composed of MnO6 octahedra connected by trigonal carbonate units. The large buff-colored balls are manganese atoms and the smaller, bluish-colored balls connected directly to the manganese atoms are oxygen atoms. The middle-sized darker balls not connected directly to the manganese atoms are the carbon atoms of carbonate.
Manganese is not uncommon in the Colorado Rockies. A mining geologist once complained to me that there was so much manganese in their gold mine tailings that it was a regulatory problem for them. For a time pyrolusite, or manganese dioxide (MnO2), was mined in Colorado, near Salida. Never a large operation, pyrolusite could be used in the extraction of gold from its ore.
Crushed pyrolusite was placed below a wooden container along with sodium chloride. To this mixture was added concentrated sulfuric acid. This generated gaseous hydrochloric acid which was then oxidized by the manganese dioxide in the pyrolusite into chlorine gas which flowed up through the container of gold ore combined with the gold ore and generated gold chloride. The water-soluble gold chloride was removed with water, then isolated and into this pregnant solution was dumped scrap iron. The iron reduced the gold chloride and finely divided gold precipitated out. This was a pretty danged clever method for use in the field as it required only water, NaCl, H2SO4 and pyrolusite mineral which could have been mined in Colorado.
Oh, BTW. You might know that a way to generate a stream of fairly dry HCl gas (in a lab fume hood!!!) is to place granular NaCl into a vented flask and slowly drip conc H2SO4 from an addition funnel on it. A stream of nitrogen is used to force a flow of HCl out of the flask and through a sparge tube into your reaction flask.
And, speaking of metals ...
Nearby the Sweet Home Mine, a hop, skip and a jump across the ridge to the NW is the Climax Molybdenum Mine on Fremont Pass just west up the road from the Copper Mountain Ski Resort. This major mining operation is owned and operated by Climax Molybdenum Company, a subsidiary of Freeport-McMoRan. If you look at the image for a minute, perhaps you can see that most of Bartlett Mountain is gone. Just imagine laboring in a frigid mine above the 11,000 ft altitude. I’d be dead by noon the first day …
Source: Google Earth. Just a few miles NNW of the Sweet Home Mine is the Climax Molybdenum Mine on Freemont pass.
The mineral of interest at the Climax is molybdenite, or molybdenum sulfide, MoS2. The deposit was discovered in 1879 by prospector Charles Senter who was actually prospecting for gold or silver. By 1895 Senter found a chemist who determined that the mineral contained molybdenum. At that time, however, there was no market for the moly. In a few years steelmakers discovered that molybdenum had application in steel making and, with the onset of WWI. the mine went into full production after it was discovered that the Germans were using it to strengthen steel in their tanks and weapons.
The National Mining Museum and Hall of Fame down the road in Leadville has a large collection of interesting artifacts from early mining efforts at Climax. If you have been in many mines, you’ll know that they are mostly hallways that have been blasted out of solid rock. When mining activity stops, they are eerily quiet.
Image source: National Mining Museum in Leadville, CO. Colorized photo of lunch time in the mine.
Molybdenum sulfide is also valued as a dry lubricant for use in the temperature extremes and vacuum of space. Dry, low vapor pressure lubricants are used to prevent evaporation and contamination of optical surfaces on a satellite.
Lamentations on Chemistry 