Top Gun: Maverick

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History. I’m preparing myself for the upcoming May 27th release of Top Gun: Maverick. To be blunt, I’m still disappointed by the first movie which was released in 1986, so I’m bracing to be disappointed again. Make no mistake, I am an aviation enthusiast and I did really enjoy the flying action scenes with the F-14’s in the first movie. The flying shots were well thought out and captured on film. So, what’s not to like? Well … the rest of the story. The content that is left over when you take out the aircraft and the flying. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times said it best, “”Movies like Top Gun are hard to review because the good parts are so good and the bad parts are so relentless.”

Current. On to the recent release, Top Gun: Maverick. As before the flying sequences were quite good. But again it was against the backdrop of, well, a dumb story. As before the story is written to feature studly macho bravado against the lone-wolf instinct on the part of Maverick. The strenuously independent behavior of Maverick flies in the face of military discipline and is where I part company with the story.

The old timer, Maverick, is finally brought in to lead a group of Top Gun fighter jocks to bomb a highly defended hard target in what looks like a deep crater with impossibly steep walls. Among the best of the best, Maverick is regarded by old timers to be the very best despite his undisciplined ways. Of course, the new generation of fighter pilots are skeptical.

A lot happens … yada, yada, … love interest … yada, yada … guilt trip …. etc, etc … steal a fighter from the enemy … resolve to overcome adversity one more time … zip, zing, zowie … triumph!!

A movie is entertainment that requires you to set aside disbelief. Very often I can do it. But this time I couldn’t.

Cracker Barrel vs Cry Babies

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I have nothing constructive to add here, but it’s just too funny to leave alone. A scandal has hit the news. Cracker Barrel has announced they are offering a new plant-based sausage on their menu. It has resulted in an flood of outrage on the interwebs. Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, indignant customers are venting their outrage over an optional menu item as a menacing sign of what is to come.

The US Navy may be adding it to their menu, sparking righteous indignation from our very own pistol packin’ Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). It was proposed for the 2023 defense budget. Boebert cried out that it is “liberal woke garbage”. It’s a new food choice for our sailors, Lauren. You are crying wolf again.

According to a source that I don’t trust and never quote, the New York Post, Tejas Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) voted against it in 2021. In a Twitter thread, he exclaimed

“A woke military that drafts our daughters, wastes resources on Green New Deal garbage, holds no one accountable for Afghanistan disaster, and prioritizes playing leftist politics over destroying our enemies,” he wrote in the thread. “Rep. Roy voted no.”

Oh! The horror of it! A vegan meat substitute is an example of wokeness, they rage. To be woke is to be aware of social injustice and to tolerate the choices of other people. But to the lunatic fringe, it is a crime against MAGA land.

It will be interesting to see what the restaurant does about this, if anything. It is an amusing tempest in a teapot.

LyondellBasell to Produce Pyrolysis Oils from Plastic

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According to Reuters, LyondellBasell is considering converting it’s Houston refinery to the production of pyrolysis oils. The Houston crude oil refinery is scheduled to close at the end of 2023. The new operation would recycle plastic waste by pyrolysis and convert it to a stream of hydrocarbons referred to as pyrolysis oil. The company announced that hydrotreaters on the current plant site could be used to upgrade the pyrolysis oil. ICIS reports that they will use a selective catalyst in the process to produce a pyrolysis oil that is said to be similar to naphtha.

ICIS reports that the pyrolysis oil could be transferred to a nearby Channelview cracker by pipeline to crack the pyrolysis oils into a into undisclosed products.

LyondellBasell announced in May of 2021 from Wesseling, Germany, that it has been making steps toward a circular economy by converting polymer waste to virgin quality polymer. It was reported that they intend to produce ethylene and propylene monomer from their process. Virgin quality polymer would open the food contact market to the product. Details are limited.

Polymer waste contains a good deal of potential energy locked in the hydrocarbon chains. Conversion to liquid fuels would represent a type of energy recovery. I have not seen thermodynamic calculations revealing the energy efficiency in converting polymer waste to fuel.

Most synthetic organic polymers are substantially hydrocarbon in composition and can be thermally depolymerized or otherwise cracked to produce valuable liquid chemical feedstocks. Some companies are now realizing the value locked into polymer waste.

LyondellBasell has pledged to reduce CO2 emissions 15 % per ton of product worldwide.

Spite

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I heard a joke from a Russian friend years ago. It goes like this-

A farmer was standing by a fence along his property. Suddenly God appeared before him. God said “Yuri, you have been a good man during your life. As a reward, I’m going to grant you one wish. But you must know that I will grant the same wish to your neighbor.” The farmer thought about it for a moment and said “kill my cow.”

Know anybody like this?

Republican’s View of Freedom and Liberty

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Warning: Political comment below.

President #45 has a life-long background in management and as a CEO of privately-held corporations. This private ownership world is not a democracy. It is by nature an authoritarian command and control situation where the Board of Directors and CEO operate the corporation. Often the Chairman of the Board is also the CEO. This system is hierarchical with a strict chain of command. Just existing as an upper level manager in this private world has a large component of loyalty to the CEO.

In this private corporate world, it is just assumed by the finance people to go all out to minimize taxes and maximize margins. The legal department doesn’t need to be told to get and keep the corporation and it’s executives out of trouble with civil and criminal law. “Out of trouble” can also mean plausible deniability. Managers don’t need to be told that their jobs depend on getting their numbers for the quarter. If the HR department has any due process at all, it will strongly favor the company.

An old trick in the business world when legal trouble looms is to round up a team of lawyers and bog everything down in court delays and appeals. Bankrupt your opponent with legal bills and wind down the clock. Number 45 learned this years ago with his lawyer Roy Cohn. Sue everybody who crosses you. It is a big stick he swings around to this very day.

The incidence of psychopathic behavior is a bit higher among CEOs. Commonly, a large spectrum of aberrant behaviors are tolerated by a Board of Directors, as long as the good numbers keep rolling in. If you are the Chairman, the CEO, and the major stakeholder, there is only the law and the market to set your boundaries. Even that can be challenged if you have good staff lawyers.

President #45 came into office from years as a television performer and as a Chief Executive Officer of resort property development and casino businesses. Apart from managing large organizations from the top level with accountability only to himself and possibly his creditors, #45 had zero experience, or interest evidently, that naturally leads to being president of a vast administrative branch of government with large international and military interests. Yet, under the guise of “draining the swamp” and the wide spread misogynistic antipathy towards Hillary Clinton, he became president of the electoral college, or ahem, the USA.

Ok. After this lengthy preamble, here is my point. A common rallying cry held by supporters of #45 is support for liberty and freedom. They look to a man whose entire professional career has been at the helm of autocratic organizations that bear no resemblance to a culture of liberty and freedom. Top down command of loyal associates is all he knows. His world view as an autocrat is “what can you do for me in addition to unswerving loyalty?” The crowds demand liberty and freedom but it is completely disconnected from what #45’s life has been all about. His presidency was a disaster for liberty and freedom.

Moab and Uravan on the Colorado Plateau

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(Updated 7/31/22) We took a little trip to Moab, Utah, recently. As expected it is a charming but very touristy little town. It is a good starting point for exploring what erosion has done to the Colorado Plateau. Moab has the frenetic energy of a ski town where everyone is planning a good time or will die trying. A few miles to the north are the red sandstone fins of Arches National Park. The tall fins result from fracturing of the local sandstone formation from uplifting. The vertical fins are what’s left when the cracks in the formation erode away and widen over the eons, leaving narrow vertical slabs of sandstone. Over time some of these fins were hollowed out by erosion, producing arch formations.

Photo credit: Arnold Ziffel. Arches National Park, 2022

To the southwest a few miles is Dead Horse Point State Park. It has one main attraction which is a stunning overlook of the Colorado River and the northeast end of Canyonlands National Park. If you are in Moab it is worth a visit.

Photo credit: Arnold Ziffel. Canyonlands National Park, 2022

From Moab we traveled south and east across the La Sal Mountains and through the Paradox Valley in west central Colorado to visit Naturita and Uravan. Both are former uranium mill towns but Uravan is probably better known for it. The name comes from URAnium-VANadium ore found in the region. Moab also had a uranium boom and has a radioactive mill tailings legacy.

The settlement of what would later be called Uravan, the namesake of the Uravan Mineral Belt, began as a mill site for the production of radium. The Standard Chemical Corporation built the Joe Jr. Mill in 1912 next to where the town of Uravan would eventually be built. The market for the radioactive alkaline earth metal was very lucrative and it spawned a short-lived radium mining industry on the Colorado Plateau. Where there are rich occurrences of uranium you will find it’s decay product radium. At the beginning of the radium boom, starting in 1912, there were no known uses of uranium other than for making colored ceramic glaze or glass. The radium mill tailings would later be valuable for the uranium and vanadium content. As of 2011 radium is extracted from spent nuclear fuel.

The demand for American radium slumped in about 1921 due to cheaper imports from the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). There was little activity until 1935 when the US Vanadium Corporation bought the milling operations for the production of vanadium. Earlier it had been discovered that a small amount of vanadium alloyed with steel produced a valuable steel alloy. A few years later, as part of the Manhattan Project the US government started a uranium boom with attractive prices for yellowcake, the uranium oxide precursor to uranium hexafluoride. While US Vanadium produced vanadium, it had a secret contract with the War Department to provide uranium yellowcake as well. Vanadium production was a good cover for the production of uranium.

The mineral that was mined in the area was the bright yellow colored carnotite which was dispersed in sandstone. Carnotite is potassium uranyl vanadate hydrate, K2(UO2)2(VO4)2·3H2O. It is found in a 2 to 4 ft thick layer of the Morrison Formation, upper Jurassic, with an average concentration of 0.25 % U3O8 and 2 % V2O5. The deposits are usually found in clusters that have spotty distribution according to USGS surveys.

Notice that the U and V of the carnotite formula above is different from the U3O8 and V2O5 figures cited? A common way of expressing the composition of metals in an ore is to convert the various metal species into the metal oxide equivalents. This allows the direct comparison of different mineral compositions in terms of a common metal oxide equivalent.

Many towns thrived in the uranium belt during the boom time but began to collapse in the 1970’s and 80’s when the government quit buying yellowcake, U3O8. Naturita (pronounced ‘natta Reeta’) is such a town. While the town didn’t collapse, it did suffer when the uranium boom fizzled and employment disappeared with it. The town has an organization called the Rimrocker Historical Society with a decent museum that is worth a visit.

Photo credit: Arnold Ziffel. Downtown Naturita, 2022

There is nothing left of the company mill town of Uravan. It has been bulldozed flat and completely buried. It is now a Superfund site ghost town. Radium contamination is a continuing legacy of the boom times in uranium country.

Photo credit: Arnold Ziffel. Site of the former uranium and vanadium mill town of Uravan, Colorado, 2022. The actual burial site is on the mesa above and left (west) of the valley town site in this north-looking photo.

$$ Pump Kit

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I was a little surprised at the pump head rebuild kits for my two chemical metering pumps in the lab. They were $662 each. I don’t know what I was expecting given the small size of the pump heads. It just seems like a lot of money. These are ProMinent pumps and have always given good service. I guess I am not calibrated correctly.

The metering pumps feed a Mettler-Toledo instrument, so I should be used to expensive parts. Everything from Mettler seems to be priced in multiples of $2500 and is shipped on a crippled barge from Europe. Just kidding. Mettler makes good equipment but they are a bit on the slow side.

Again, #45 Blows a Gasket About the Pulitzer

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Warning. What follows has political content that may offend some readers.

The former president, that is #45, has been busy venting gas about how his demand that the Pulitzer Prize board withdraw two 2018 prizes has been denied. One, to the Washington Post for investigative reporting and the other to The New York Times for public service . This pathetic man, the anointed savior of evangelical MAGA Republicans and the Lord High Magistrate of what is right for the MAGA way of life, openly and strenuously defecates on anyone who annoys or contradicts him. You might think that such a man of demonstrated low ethical and moral character would be immediately dismissed by conservative Americans. You know, the people who feel that they are the keepers of what’s good and right about America. As we all know, this hasn’t happened. He is still believed by a great many to be the right guy to “drain the swamp” in Washington, DC. It seems that no disgrace can bump him off this pedestal or repel his followers.

I describe myself as a pragmatic liberal. I accept the reality and value to a fair extent of capitalist markets and the need to reasonably control the reach of government. However I do believe in the value of a united America where citizens can trust that large scale and international issues can be handled by the federal government.

What a shame it is that the US is burdened with #45 and his MAGA cultists in a time of serious global tension posed by two authoritarian regimes aiming to knock us down more than a few notches. They assault the country daily with attacks over the internet. China’s respect for American intellectual property is and has always been nil. Since the 1970’s, China has been sending students and scientists to the US for an education in science and engineering. They returned to their country to help build the technological powerhouse that they now are. It has successfully rallied it’s population with many years of scornful propaganda against the US and liberal democracy. So far, China has been successful in it’s plan to economically dominate much of Africa and it’s mineral resources. It is flexing it’s muscles in the South China Sea and aggressively menacing Taiwan as it applies economic pressure on Australia to accept it’s dominating presence in the region.

Russia, as the free world knows, has invaded Ukraine on laughably fictitious grounds and is pummeling the country to rubble with constant artillery fire. Russia is fighting a war of extermination as it wantonly rapes and murders innocent civilians. The homicidal Putin has dug himself in with a wall around himself that seems impregnable to an internal rebellion. He is a psychopath with nuclear weapons and an army who is bent on shaping his part of the world into the Mother Russia he imagines it once was.

All of this and more is happening in the world around us. The world order that the US has come to structure itself around is coming apart. All the while, America is preoccupied with a circular firing squad of squabbling over religious and political abstractions. Our two-party system limps along with one party rotting to the bone. The American Republican party has morphed into a 2-headed monster thanks to #45 and his unrelenting incitement of the lunatic fringe and those left behind by technological and economic progress.

The American experiment with fascism is accelerating as ultraconservatives buckle their seatbelts in political positions ranging from school boards and county representatives to state houses and the US congress. America’s vast political middle ground trends towards lazy disinterest with a long record of low voter turnout. The ultra-right knows and relies on the laziness of the left and center.

Ultraconservative evangelical preachers have been on the airwaves for decades pushing their twisted theory of the universe. Their rhetorical skills are considerable. The brick and mortar preachers are now teaching followers that the end is near and #45 has been sent by God to smooth the way for the prophesied apocalypse set to begin in Israel.

Somebody once said, “when fascism comes to America, it will be draped in a flag and carrying a cross.” It’s beginning to look that way.

The Id, Ego, Super-Ego, and the Stupid

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I thought I’d add a new component to Freud’s structural model of the psyche. That would be the Stupid. It sits apart from the Id in that it can be at play in both the conscious and the unconscious mind. Unlike the Id, the Stupid can be both subconscious and premeditated. It can slip out as an urgent flash from the lizard brain and fly past the ego into full view. Freud felt that the role of the ego was to mediate between the Id and reality. Sometimes, thoughts can overwhelm the mind’s layers of protection. The Stupid can display itself in its full regalia abruptly or after much rumination. It begins with a swirl of feelings that erupt into a kind of psychic solar flare that blasts out into the world for all to see. For a glorious moment it provides a pulse of gratification that seems “Oh, So Right”. But being the Stupid, it can promptly collapse under the weight of it’s own, well, stupidity, or it can float around out there and mingle with the thoughts of others for a long period of time. Even find it’s way into print for all eternity like this post.

Of course, the previous paragraph, while having an appealing ring to it, is total fiction.

My interest is in rehabilitating the word “stupid” in my own mind. I have always avoided using the word because I believed it was meant to accuse someone of being mentally deficient and therefore slanderous. It is widely felt that even if well founded, its use is rude. I had a midwestern Lutheran upbringing and so rude was something that you just don’t do.

I’ve been struggling to find a word that describes a person who harbors Republican evangelical, fascist or totalitarian fantasies, but who may appear and function normally. They seem to be everywhere. While I would like to include those who attempt a gibbering explanation of a libertarian utopia, I’m as yet undecided. A wave of the hand and dismissal with a bell curve argument isn’t enough. Is this cognitive elitism? Yeah, pretty much.

Mental deficiency is only one of several meanings of the word stupid. Google defines stupid as “having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense.” Excoriating someone for being mentally deficient or lacking in intelligence is mean spirited and is to be avoided in a civilized world.

The question of how common is common sense is a matter of debate. At its base, common sense would be a grasp or recognition of something that most would agree should be obvious to everyone. But, it seems to me that common sense is something that is learned over time and experience. You couldn’t just pop out of the womb and instinctively know that safety glasses should be worn when handling chemicals. People will vary widely in their inventory of common sense notions. Maybe common sense cannot be a universal package of instinct. Maybe the very idea of common sense rests on feet of clay. That it is just a rhetorical slight-of-hand used to make a hasty judgement and win the argument.

According to Wiktionary, stupid can also mean “exhibiting the quality of having been done by someone lacking in intelligence”. “Exhibiting the quality” is not the same as being fundamentally unintelligent, is it? It’s just the appearance of unintelligent. I think I’ll run with that.

I’ll have to come clean. I have shown a good deal of exhibiting the quality of stupidity in the past by my previous unfortunate choices. No, seriously, it is true. But that doesn’t disqualify me from recognizing it elsewhere. I know what I’m looking for.

Kissinger: Status Quo Ante for Ukraine

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Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, aged 99, has released a new book recently titled “Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy” and as a result has been on the interview circuit. A review of his life can be found on Wikipedia. An interesting interview was reported on Spiegel International recently. I was alive when Kissinger was doing shuttle diplomacy in Viet Nam and when he and Nixon went to China for the summit with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1972. Nixon’s trip to China was a very big event then.

Right at the start of the interview, Spiegel asked Kissinger about a comment he is alleged to have said at the recent Davos conference. Kissinger was quick to correct the report.

Der Spiegel: “… Is this what you had in mind with your recent statement at the World Economic Forum in Davos, when you suggested that Ukraine accept a temporary division of the country, developing one part into a pro-Western, democratic and economically strong nation while waiting for history to reunite the country as a whole?”

Kissinger: “What I said is this: To end this war, the best dividing line would be the status quo ante, which means 93 percent of the country. That’s quite a different thing. If one identifies the status quo ante as the objective, that would mean that aggression has not succeeded. The issue, then, is a ceasefire along the February 24 line of contact. The territory still controlled by Russia, which makes up about 2.5 percent of Ukrainian territory in the Donbas as well as the Crimean Peninsula, would then be part of a general negotiation.”

Kissinger goes on the comment on China and Taiwan. He suggests that while the US is involved with Russian aggression indirectly, a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be full scale and put the US and China in direct conflict.

Kissinger believes in the support given to Ukraine by NATO to defeat Russian aggression. He goes on to emphasize that Europe needs to find a working relationship with Russia irrespective of the outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian war. He says-

 “… the relationship of Russia to Europe needs to be addressed, namely the question as to whether it is a part of European history, or a permanent opponent based on other territories. That will become a main issue. And it is one that is independent of the conclusion of the war in Ukraine …”.

This kind of strategic thinking is in the realm of statesmanship.