Another Tick in the Doomsday Clock – Tactical Nuclear Weapons

Modernization means escalation

It’s hard to say what is the most disturbing thing president Trump said in his State of the Union address, but there’s one that was not just disturbing, but frightening—the idea of “modernizing” our nuclear arsenal.

“Modernization” means, for starters, modifying our strategic force (i.e. big bombs, 100 kilotons of TNT equivalent yield on up) to make it more flexible and deadly.  Sounds bad, right?  Exactly what Donald Trump wants–as always, he wants to be the biggest and baddest dude on the planet. Whatever the cost.  The cost in dollars, of course, will ultimately be measured in hundreds of billions.  The increased risk of strategic nuclear exchanges will be immeasurable.

For a look at what modernization portends, read the executive summary of the latest Nuclear Posture Review to be found here.

On the strategic side, the upgrading will be a bolstering of our forces of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) with Russia.* 

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Freedom from Regulation: No Foul Lines

Give me liberty, or give me strangling regulation!

The self-contradictions in economic libertarianism are acknowledged even by libertarians.  Ron Paul himself has accepted that some constraints on pollution are necessary, to prevent polluters in one geographical area from inflicting harm on people in other geographical areas—acid rain, where smokestack emissions in one place inflict damage downwind, being a simple case in point.  Water pollution operates under a similar principle. Unregulated, uncontained pollution represents an “externalized cost”—there’s a cost paid not by the polluter but by the victims.  In general the victims—people, plants, animals—are indirectly injured, and each individual only by a tiny amount at any one time in any one place.  The damage is cumulative—little noticed in the moment, but with large consequences over long spans of time.

You’d think that externalized costs of many kinds would present difficulties in principle for most libertarians—coal plants release mercury into the atmosphere, causing damage to health outside the coal plant, for which coal plants should be held responsible.*  It’s part of libertarianism that everyone should be free to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt others. Ergo, to be consistent, individuals (to include  corporations, whom the Supreme Court has deemed to have the rights of individual citizens), should be no freer to spew toxic contaminants at the public, than to rob them at gunpoint.

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Pruitt Gets Pushback from Freight Industry

Pruitt EPA: Serving a VERY Special Interest

Let’s not assume that the transportation and freight industries are all on board with every environmentally hostile move made by the Trump administration—in particular the moves of that mendacious boot-licker of fossil fuel interests, Scott Pruitt.

Check out this January 28 piece from The Energy Collective on backlash from the freight industry at Pruitt’s proposal to exempt certain heavy polluters from existing emissions regulations:

Pruitt offers loophole to “glider trucks”

Note especially  the comment of one experienced heavy duty truck dealer referring to “days years ago when our truck shop was so thick with the exhaust from the trucks you could not see the other side of our shop.”  Here’s a guy (I assume a guy) who had first-hand, concrete visual evidence of the damage from heavily polluting vehicles of the past in his own shop—someone for whom environmental unfriendliness is more than a mere leftist catchphrase.  Imagine what he’s telling his grandchildren about Scott Pruitt. (And maybe the entire Trump administration.)

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Confirmed beyond a Reasonable Doubt: ExxonMobile Lied Big-Time

Researchers measure disconnect between science and public relations at ExxonMobil

Most readers of this blog are aware of a discrepancy between what ExxonMobil scientists have been reporting for decades, in a purely scientific context, and the company’s position as reflected in public statements and media “advertorials.”

But how big is the discrepancy? How about, enormous.

Two Harvard researchers undertook to pin down the magnitude of the discrepancy quantitatively—chiefly by content analysis—and the results surprised even me.  The thrust of the analysis rested on the frequency with which ExxonMobil scientists published scientific papers supporting the hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change, versus the public statements and advertorials in media such as the New York Times.

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Cyclists More Law-Abiding then Drivers? Maybe.

Strictly law-abiding cyclists?  Not a majority!

As a generally law-abiding cyclist, I am reluctant to criticize a study that gives cyclists high marks for law-abidingness, but responsibility requires that I call out distortions, such as. . .

As reported in Outside magazine, a study by the Florida Department of Transportation tried to assess whether cyclists are more law-abiding than drivers, and concluded in the affirmative.

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Doctor Confirms Trump is a Monster

Trump out of excuses for toxic behavior

Yesterday we heard the official White House doctor reports President Trump to be in good health (due to “good genes” rather than healthy behavior) and scored perfectly on a cognitive test.

You may ask what sort of pressure was put on the doctor to give Trump a much better than passing grade. But, if we can take the good doctor at his word—keeping in mind whom he’s working for—it means that there are no excuses left for what the President says and does.

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THE MOST AMAZING YEAR IN SPACE, EVER , PART 3: When Neutron Stars Collide

On August 17th, 2017, the collision of two neutron stars 300 million light years away was observed, initially detected by the arrival of gravity waves. It was a watershed moment in both observational astronomy and astrophysics.

By last fall, you may have become somewhat blasé about gravitational waves: four occurrences had been reported to the public beginning in 2015, all of them involving the merging of black holes in enormously distant galaxies, to little effect on Earth—any tremor you might possibly have felt could equally have been produced by a FedEx van five blocks away going over a speed bump.

Ah—but what occurred last August,* and released publicly to mainstream media on October 16, was an extra special  event, arguably more interesting than any of the black hole stories. Not in the magnitude of gravity waves (again, something we animals would never have felt). . . but in the practice of astronomy, what came out of it was a game-changer, heralded by many as the advent of “multi-messenger astronomy.”

It was an astonishing event in (at least) three important respects:

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Women Kick Butt to Kick Off 2018

It’s a rising tide.  Momentum from the women of 2017 carries right into 2018.

Oprah Winfrey’s rousing speech at the Golden Globes fueled hopes that the #MeToo movement will be more than just backlash against exploitation and abuse by men.   It was also a  call for women not just to step up, but to move forward.  It was a call to arms.

And two days later,  Diane Feinstein took the fight to the entrenched leadership of the Republican Party, by releasing the transcript of testimony from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in defiance of Committee Chair Charles Grassley. That was the testimony by Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS on investigations into Trump’s twisted history, that was conducted during the 2016 election.

The transcript of Simpson’s testimony itself—not classified, but kept under wraps by Grassley and his henchmen—revealed just what malicious games Grassley and his allies in deceit such as Lindsey Graham, have been practicing, in their attempt to undermine the investigation of Russian interference with the 2016 election.*

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Superintelligence: Proceed with Caution

Superintelligence: a Book, an Hypothesis, a Warning

After having earlier dismissed Artificial Intelligence as a bogeyman, I confess to being deeply frightened by the book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. (2014)

The book’s author is Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute and director of the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre at the University of Oxford.  You can view his academic creds on Wikipedia. There’s an excellent profile of him—highly recommended—in The Guardian* at Guardian profile of Nick Bostrom

If you’ve heard much about Nick Bostrom or the Future of Humanity Institute, what follows could be a rehash. But I’ll plow ahead even though this book is four years old, for what it may be worth.

In the first paragraph, The Guardian puts the scope of Bostrom’s concerns this way:  “Notably: what exactly are the “existential risks” that threaten the future of our species; how do we measure them; and what can we do to prevent them? Or to put it another way: in a world of multiple fears, what precisely should we be most terrified of?”

The Guardian’s piece identifies Bostrom’s key themes, and is so informative (including telling nuances such as Bostrom’s finicky diet and germ phobia) that I have little of substance to add on the man himself, but the following is my take on the most salient messages from his signature work, Superintelligence.

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More on “The Other Addiction”

George Will gets one thing right

In a recent op-ed in the Washington Post (link below), the conservative intellectual George Will engaged in one of  his favorite tasks of bashing other intellectuals for their dire predictions  of doom, using one of his favorite sages, Eric Hoffer.

There’s some truth in his point about doom-saying intellectuals, although on the tax bill issue he’s off the mark—he’s overlooking the long-term effects of the new tax bill.  Not that George Will is myopic; instead he skips the subject because slashing the corporate tax is an item of conservative faith.  He might think the cut was too big, but in principle it’s a move in the right direction. So he won’t talk about its defects.

The  “attention economy” and undermining of human will

It’s at the end of this opinion piece that George Will (not “human will”) puts his finger on something that’s really troubling: the internet heating public discourse to the boiling point,  especially in social media.

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