Month: June 2024

Keeping The Electricity On

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

I woke up to no electrical power this morning. It was a calm night, mostly free of clouds, no rain, and the power was out in my neighborhood. You could see the darkened area. Sometimes there seems to be a reason for an outage, like high winds, sometimes not, like this morning.

I checked PNM via my smartphone, now also the only operating clock in the house. Outage reported at 3:57 am, projected to be repaired by 6:15 am, 720 customers.

Next question was how to go about starting the morning. The refrigerator and freezer are highly insulated, so they will keep things cold, but don’t open them a lot to make breakfast. I’ve got a new gas stovetop. Does it work? Yes, it does, and I can light the gas with strike-anywhere matches that I keep for an occasion like this. On the safety side, it seems a poor idea to allow the gas to flow when the igniters aren’t working, but it’s nice to be able to make a cup of tea.

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Peace Through Strength

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

It has a ring to it, doesn’t it? We can indulge our fantasies of being superheroes, and the rest of the world will look up to us.

More seriously, a case can be made that military strength is good. (And economic, that’s part of it too, or should be.) But military security is not the whole story; building alliances, spreading goodwill, and diplomacy to deal with problems are all part of a balanced foreign policy.

Building up military strength is likely to lead to a security dilemma: other countries see the buildup as a possible prelude to invasion or war, so they build up, so we have to build up further, and so on. We are likely in that sequence with China’s nuclear program now.

Donald Trump’s last National Security Advisor, Robert O’Brien, has laid out a foreign policy program for another Trump administration under the rubric “Peace Through Strength.” The first several paragraphs tout Trump’s foreign policy and even what Trump thinks. It’s not clear whether this article somehow involved Trump in the making and O’Brien is on his way to Trump’s cabinet, or whether O’Brien is auditioning for Trump’s NSA or Secretary of State.

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How Not To Do History, by The New York Times

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Another chapter in the New York Times’s getting it wrong. The motivation for this example, though, is more opaque than for others.

Barton Bernstein is an emeritus professor at Stanford University. He has written a number of books on recent American history, with an emphasis on Cold War and nuclear issues. What the Times did got his attention. A few of us noted the bizarre article by Catie Edmondson when it appeared in January. Bernstein destroys it.

In January 2024, a Washington-based New York Times reporter, Catie Edmondson, landed a journalistic plum: a “Reporter’s Notebook” article on the front-page of the newspaper, complete with a two-page spread inside the paper, with illustrations. She presented the story as a pioneering article that allegedly uncovered a hitherto unknown, or little known, secret: precisely how the US government funded the atomic bomb during World War 2. The Times underscored the seeming importance of the article by featuring, above the fold, a picture of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the wartime director of Los Alamos and “father of the A-bomb,” along with Army General Leslie R. Groves, director of the Manhattan Project. Other photos inside further emphasized what the editors apparently deemed as her article’s significance.

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Sometimes We Do Something Right

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Voyager I is operational again and sending back data about interstellar space. It suffered an outage six months ago, possibly because of a hit by a cosmic particle that the Sun’s influence protects us from. Voyager is now outside that protective influence.

Voyager was launched in 1977. Its software is that old. It has traveled so far in 47 years that its signals take almost a full 24 hours to reach Earth. And it keeps on going, into a region that no other earthly spacecraft has reached.

It was expected to last for four years, but it was well built, and so far the operations crew has been able to coax it over difficulties. It has six more years until it reaches a hard deadline: the plutonium-238 that powers its electrical generators with its decay heat will no longer be hot enough to run them.

Or it may be damaged beyond repair by more cosmic particles.

It’s a nice continuity with our earlier expectations of space and technology. The engineers and technicians who designed and built it and now maintain it have done a great job.

Image: Artist concept of Voyager 1. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Narva Is A Poor Entry Point For A Russian Invasion Of The Baltic States

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

A commenter at Lawyers, Guns & Money pointed me toward this McKay Coppins article on European concerns about another Trump presidency because it contains a section on Narva, Estonia. In the article, Coppins hopscotches across Europe to learn what those concerns are. It is a recipe for superficiality.

On Narva, Coppins repeats a slice of propaganda that Russia has been using at least since 1991.

The city of Narva sits on Estonia’s eastern border, separated from Russia by a river and a heavily guarded bridge. Some experts believe that if World War III breaks out in the coming years, this is where it will begin. The city is overwhelmingly populated by ethnic Russians, many of whom don’t speak Estonian and are therefore ineligible for citizenship. Western officials fear Putin might try to use the same playbook he developed in Crimea—enlisting Russian separatists to stoke unrest and create a pretense for annexing the city. Such a move would effectively dare the West to go to war with a nuclear power over a small Estonian city, or else watch the credibility of their vaunted alliance collapse. NATO calls this “the Narva scenario.” [emphasis added]

Conveniently, Coppins does not quote specific people. I would hope that this is because he couldn’t find any serious people holding these beliefs. Historical analogies are tempting to people who have little factual knowledge.

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Republicans Want To Blast Anthony Fauci. Again.

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Today the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic will hold a hearing. The Republicans on the committee think they have material to smear Dr. Anthony Fauci. Additionally, they want to once again try to bolster the unbolsterable idea that the virus, SARS-CoV-2, was ginned up in a Chinese lab. Preferably one funded by Fauci.

The New York Times has a good setup article (gift link). They also went all out to put their editorial thumb on the scale by publishing an interactive op-ed by the contentious Alina Chan, the most vocal of the Ph.D. proponents of the idea that the virus came from a laboratory (not gift link).

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