Helene of Tories — Trump stumps sump dump

Helene of Tories

Trump stumps sump dump

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 30th 2024

We’re with you all the way, and if we were there, we’d be helping you,” Trump said. “You’ll be okay.”

He said that the day after Hurricane Helene, by then a tropical depression, had finished wreaking havoc over a quarter of the United States and was coming to a wet fizzley end clear up in Ontario. Helene, as forecast, was a major disaster. The known death toll is mercifully low (91 so far) but the damage will be in the tens of billions of dollars. Many parts of Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee were flooded, dozens of roads and freeways washed out, and at least several dams failed.

When I first heard Trump’s latest burst of idiocy, I remembered how he famously “was there to help” in the wake of Hurricane Maria in San Yuan, Puerto Rico in 2017. He tossed paper towels to a group of survivors, an action on a par with dropping packets of chewing gun over an area suffering from famine. The BBC reported it this way: “Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz described his televised meeting with officials as a ‘PR, 17-minute meeting’. The sight of him throwing paper towels to people in the crowd was ‘terrible and abominable’, she added. Mr Trump tweeted it had been a ‘great day’ in Puerto Rico.”

He no doubt would have consoled the people hit by Helene with $10 coupons to use to buy his $500 watches. Trump, after all, is the grift that keeps on grifting.

Trump and the Republicans had waved away reports that Helene was going to be a monster. Part of it stems from their insistence that global warming is just a myth spread by liberals and communists to destroy American capitalism. Part of it is their libertarian fascist drive to convince people that government agencies such as the National Weather Service and NOAA (which runs the vital National Hurricane Center) are just propaganda organs for the left and serve no useful purpose.

As the damage became clear, Trump backtracked in his usual awkward and shameless way, saying, on Sunday, that the storm as “a big monster hurricane” that had “hit a lot harder than anyone even thought possible.” (Anyone except NWS, every reputable meteorologist in the country, and pretty much everyone with enough weather knowledge to know what ‘bombogenesis’ means.)

He criticized Harris for attending weekend “fundraising events with her radical left lunatic donors” in California while the storm hit. “She ought to be down in the area where she should be,” Trump said. I didn’t notice Trump going down there during the storm, did you? In fact, he decided Mar-A-Lago was uncomfortably close to the storm (it wasn’t) and watched from a safe distance—New York.

Per ABC News, “The White House said Harris would visit impacted areas ‘as soon as it is possible without disrupting emergency response operations.’ She also spoke with Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, and she received a briefing from Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell while she was traveling.

Trump, of course, can’t be arsed with waiting until emergency response operations have ended and things shift to recovery mode. He’s going to Valdosta Georgia today to swan around. While the water supply is now safe, Valdosta is still under an emergency curfew, much of the town is still flooded, and in addition to the 17 known dead, many more are still missing. He’s going to have his security detail shut down several blocks so he can pose, even as city authorities are begging people, “Text. Don’t Call: Texting leaves lines open for emergencies.” I’m sure he’ll be a big help.

No doubt, Trump will blame Harris for the damage. You know he will. I’ll bet the mortgage he will. As far as he’s concerned, any crisis must be used to blame Harris, real or conjured, natural or caused by Republicans. In Trump World, no crisis should go to waste, and the more dead Americans he can blame on Democrats, the better.

Remember, too that under Project 2025, the Republicans want to eliminate FEMA.

But since FEMA hasn’t yet been removed as part of the GOP’s Ayn Rand’s hellscape America, it’s still massively useful. If you want to help people in the affected areas, go here: https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20240928/how-help-after-hurricane-helene

And if you’re a Trump supporter, stay true to your principles and send rolls of paper towels.

Trump On The Ladies — Girls, he’ll show you how to be women

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

September 25th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

From CNN today:

I always thought women liked me. I never thought I had a problem. But the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me,” Trump said in Indiana, Pennsylvania. “I don’t believe it.”

The former president claimed women are “less safe,” “much poorer” and are “less healthy” now compared to when he was president and vowed to end what he described as their “national nightmare.”

Because I am your protector. I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector. I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh he wants to be their protector.’ Well, I am. As president, I have to be your protector,” Trump said.

Women, he added, “will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”

Well, now, can you little darlings all just calm down now? Uncle Donald is here to protect you from the emotional and hysterical weight of being women, and is going to take care of you all just like your daddies did.

And stop fussing about abortion, for Pete’s sake. Half of you won’t have kids anyway, being over fifty, or under 10, or, you know, ugly. Especially you libbers. Never was such a pack of hairy, ugly wimmin like that. Donald’s gonna get you into the beauty parlor, get you fixed up, make you feel worth while as human beings.

OK. I get accused of having a sick sense of humor. And yeah, that’s true. That gets me in more trouble then just about any other facet of my generally lamentable character.

But in this Age of Trump, there’s a problem with having a sick sense of humor. Events have a way of topping even my darkest comic imaginings.

Trump says he will make women happy, healthy, confident and free. Whew! That’s genius, I couldn’t match that. Andy Kaufman couldn’t match it. Sam Kinnison couldn’t match it. George Carlin would be gobsmacked. I read that, and concluded that either I took far too many drugs in the seventies, or I didn’t take enough.

Even by the standards of Trump and the GOP, this is grotesque. Trump the rapist. Trump the serial adulterer. Trump, the bozo who delighted in humiliating his first wife with his much publicized affair with Marla Maples. Trump, who packed the Supreme Court with religious fascists and crowed loudly when they rescinded a woman’s right to an abortion. Trump, who boasted about being able to “grab them by the pussy.” Trump, who smears and insults nearly any woman who dares challenge him, whether as a political opponent or a reporter asking questions.

As gaslighting goes, it’s unparalleled in its sheer brazenness and scope. Of course, for Trump, it’s just another Monday. At other times, he’s proclaimed himself the great white hope for African Americans, saying he did more for them than any president including Abraham Lincoln. His top example of black people who support him is a howling nut who proclaimed himself “a Black NAZI” and referred to MLK Jr. as “Martin Lucifer Coon.”

Nobody stands for science more than Trump, you know. He had an uncle who attended MIT. Take that, Neil Degrasse Tyson! So when he talks about windmills causing cancer, sharks electrocuting boaters, and climate change being a hoax by AOC to force us all to live in caves, why, he’s speaking as the world’s greatest authority on African Americans, women, sharks, and pets who get eaten. Or something. It’s scientifical, you know.

I imagine that next he’ll address his expertise and compassion for the lives of Asian-Americans and point out he saw all the Charlie Chan movies as a kid.

It’s getting harder to tell how much of this stuff is dementia, and how much is just the same snake-oil bullshit that’s floated Trump through his entire wastrel life. But in the end, that doesn’t matter: Either way, he is totally unfit for office. If he was your grandad, you would be taking away his car keys by now, and keeping a discreet eye on his debit card purchases.

And if you still support Trump at this point, there is something very, very wrong with you.

Fifty-to-One Odds and Ends — Did Bill Clinton give Harris the election?

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 22nd, 2024

Vivek Ramaswamy was on CNN yesterday bemoaning the fact that Kamala Harris was smearing seventy million GOP voters as ‘weird.’ Even CNN has to fact-check that, noting that Harris had called Trump and Vance weird, which they are. For that matter, Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t exactly a poster boy for normal himself, but moving on…

I spoke to a Trump supporter yesterday who ranted about how Democrats were taking adrenochrome from the bodies of dying babies to keep Biden and the rest young. I pointed out that Biden didn’t look particularly young, and he retorted that Biden would be dead if he wasn’t taking the stuff. Branes. Smart. Logically he runs circles around us all.

Now, adrenochrome actually does exist. Its a result of oxidized adrenaline; 3-hydroxy-1-methyl-2,3-dihydroindole-5,6-dione C9H9NO3). It doesn’t come from the blood of babies, Christian or otherwise.

And as far as prolonging life goes, it’s kinda the opposite: it’s rated extremely toxic, and if taken orally will make you very, very sick and in all likelihood kill you. It would explain why you never hear of Qanon types, who believe morals are something to be inflicted upon others, actually taking the stuff themselves. Ivermectin is safer, but drinking or injecting bleach and shining black lights up your ass are still bad ideas. Add adrenochrome to that list under “Evolution in Action.”

The adrenochrome conspiracy theory came from the bowels of the Qanon conspiracists, and it is nothing more than an update of the Blood Libel. They’ve updated the villains of the piece (elites, Democrats, international bankers) but they mean “Jews.” “Drinking the blood of Christian babies” sounded a bit medieval for their tastes, so they took a sinister-looking chemical name (and one not usually found in babies) and made it generic babies, and sat back and waited for the pogroms to resume.

Yes, Harris was calling Trump and Vance weird, and not Republican voters in general weird. But there’s a lot of them that fit that description. Not seventy million, but millions, at least. There are tens of millions of normal decent Republicans. They’re pretty easy to spot these days: they’re either already ‘never-Trumpers’ or they are openly expressing doubts about Trump and his policies.

Last night the Democratic convention finished its third night with the formal selection of Tim Walz as the vice presidential nominee. Coach Walz is almost ridiculously homespun middle American, straight out of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon days. Last night may just be the night that Democrats took “real America” back from the Republicans. Only with the Republicans the down-home pose was a vulture capitalist trying to sound like a hillbilly, but with Walz, it’s the real deal. He really is the local coach, the guy who helps change your tires and pulls you out of a snow bank, the neighborhood “Good Sam.”

In the meantime, Trump was snarling to aides that he “hates all of them” – Harris, Walz, the Clintons, and Biden. Ann Coulter, who for some reason doesn’t live north of the wall in Game of Thrones, made a spectacularly pathetic effort to smear Walz’s kids, calling them ‘weird’ for crying with pride at the convention last night.

Even the entertainment showed the richness of the Democrats versus the paucity of the Republicans. “Rocking in the Free World”, a favorite of Walz’s, was played with the full blessing of Neil Young, who has stridently complained about Trump’s appropriation of the song. Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Sheila E and Maren Morris all brought the house down. Oprah spoke to loud cheers. Compare with the RNC, which had a couple of D-listers and played music over the vociferous objections and cease-and-desist orders from the creators of said music. Not just weird—sad.

But it was Bill Clinton, at 78 obviously not drinking many babies but still strident and clear, who came up with the most stunning stat of all, one that will outlive the warm glow of the convention and change the political and economic landscape of the campaign over the next ten weeks.

Donald Trump back about 15 years ago said “I don’t know why, but the economy always does better under the Democrats than it does the Republicans.” It was one of those extremely rare instances where he was describing an irrefutable fact accurately.

It’s true. Wages go up, production goes up, and for America’s plutocrats who have more money than they do common sense, yes, the markets go up as well. Everyone benefits under Democratic economic policies. It’s been that way since 1933. Even government spending is better—the last two presidents to produce a balanced budget were Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton. Over nine out of every ten dollars in the national debt come from Republican policies and misadventures.

There aren’t many politicians around who understand economic matters better than Bill Clinton. He is arguably the smartest president we’ve had—not the best judgment, perhaps, but definitely smart.

In his speech, he said he encountered a stat that he couldn’t believe. He had to double check it. He had to triple check it. He was absolutely stunned.

When he recited it, I was equally stunned. I’m nowhere near Clinton’s level of knowledge and expertise, but I read and I pay attention. This was something that floored me.

Clinton said, “Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, America has created about 51 million new jobs. I swear, I checked this three times; even I couldn’t believe it. What’s the score? Democrats 50, Republicans 1.”

Over 98% of all new jobs were created under Democratic administrations. That is extraordinary.

The Democrats have almost all the major issues on their side—abortion, individual freedom, reining in corporate greed, supporting the workers and the poor. But if they want to make serious inroads into the decaying support Republicans get, they need to recite this fact—50 out of 51 million jobs—over and over. Nothing demolishes the myth that Republicans are better for the economy more thoroughly than that one.

Tonight: Harris accepts the nomination. If the evening goes as well as the first three have, this election is hers to lose.

Turning Up the Burn — Sudden Widespread Catastrophic Warming

Turning Up the Burn

Sudden Widespread Catastrophic Warming

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 4th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Back about twenty years ago, I was asked to write a piece on the effects global warming would have on our specific locale in the northern California mountains.

Well, an honest essay would have taken five seconds to write: “I don’t know.” I suggested this to my editor, who was unamused and gave me the Editor Glower. So, OK. Write something that won’t be too embarrassing.

I hit on a simple model. Suppose a uniform rise in temperature of three degrees Fahrenheit? Uniform. Every day exactly three degrees warmer than what the latest 30 year model showed as averages for each date.

Of course it was absurd on the face of it. “Average temperature” in the mountains is at best a polite suggestion, and in some years, a bad joke. Well, anywhere, really, but especially in the mountains where the weather is particularly variable. Microclimates rule. “If you don’t like the weather, move over five feet.” The almanacs list “first frost” and “last frost” but in any given year that can vary by six weeks in either direction—or more. “Playing to the averages” is how casinos make money and their customers don’t.

So I took the most simple-minded approach possible. I simply transposed the averages from a town at slightly less than 1,000 feet lower elevation than ours, and described the lengths of seasons, growing seasons, and the effects on regional vegetation. I even shifted the climate/weather bands south, giving us the weather patterns for Seattle. Why not? We already share volcanoes and a snotty attitude towards Los Angeles. One thing I got (sorta) right: even with more rain, there would be more drought. My editor, who normally was scientifically literate, didn’t understand that theory at all.

It made for a dramatic piece, even if it had all the scientific validity of phrenology.

But now it’s 2024, and we’ve just had the hottest month in recorded history. Not just here, but world-wide. Locally, it’s been pretty dramatic. At the time I wrote that piece, the hottest day I had recorded at the house was 98. We broke 100 for the first time in 2012, hit it five times last year, and thirteen times (so far) this year, including our hottest day to date—109. Nights are warmer, as well. Mornings it didn’t get below 60 used to be very rare, happening maybe once every other year. This year we’ve had ten nights where it stayed that warm, including a new record—a low of 69. Perhaps in a few years, I (or somebody) will be musing about how lows above 70 used to be unheard-of.

At least now a lot of local residents understand the concept of transpiration and evaporative rates. We’ve just had two very wet water years, running 150% of normal between them for a total of 150” inches over those two years. The first winter we saw vast amounts of snow—sixteen feet where I live. The reservoirs were all full this spring, the conifers lush and green. A lot of people relaxed a bit, reasoning this would be a mild fire season. People who did know better engaged in frantic brush clearance around the local towns. We have eighteen towns in this county, and ten of them have had major wildfire damage over the past ten years, some of them more than once.

And sure enough, by July 22nd, we were officially listed as being in moderate drought. And we’ve been getting red flag warnings and fire weather advisories. The Park Fire exploded out of Chico’s Bidwell Park, and in just six days became the third biggest fire in California history, racing over the grass, brush and chaparral of the Sierra foothills.

Not only has it been insanely hot, but unusually dry—we haven’t had any measurable rain here since April 25th. So we’re in drought. Imagine if one or both winters had been drier than usual.

Remember that sixteen feet of snow I mentioned? It isn’t a record for the town: we got twenty-two feet in the winter of ‘51-52, nearly all of it in February in two titanic storms. But in recent decades we had seen our annual average drop from fourteen feet in the thirties to just eight feet in the 2010s. Partly that was from the creation of Shasta Lake, which warmed our winters (by way of example, 2022-23 was the coldest winter the town had experienced in thirty years. But in the town’s 140 year history, it was only the 77th coldest winter!) and partly because of prolonged and severe droughts.

That sixteen feet was also a result of global warming. While temperatures between storms were persistently cold, temperatures during the storms were a couple of degrees above normal. And if it was usually 28 degrees when snowing and was now 30, that may not sound like much, but the warmer systems can hold a LOT more water—or in this case, snow. We got very heavy wet snow, both in terms of amount and in terms of water equivalent—the snow was wetter and heavier than normal, and did a fair bit of damage.

So we’re seeing some of the more obvious complications of global warming now, and people are noticing. There’s many more to come, and the ones that worry me are the ones we can’t see coming. But it’s safe to say we won’t like it when they do arrive.

As mentioned, the hot July was world wide. That was already the case before the numbers came in from Antarctica.

Across the entire southern polar ice cap, an area roughly the size of the lower 48, temperatures for the month were a staggering 10 degrees Celsius—or 18 degrees Fahrenheit—above normal. Nobody saw that coming.

To the hundreds of people living there, it probably wasn’t noticeable except on the thermometer readings. After all, it’s deepest darkest winter in July, and there isn’t a whole lot of discernible difference between minus fifty eight and minus forty. Fortunately, this weirding heat wave didn’t reach the coasts of the continent, where temperatures are milder and glaciers and sea ice are already melting at a frightening rate.

A heat increase on that scale was utterly inconceivable. On any other continent, such a thing would cause the deaths of millions and perhaps billions of people. Widespread famine, incredible fire storms, and complete destruction of entire ecosystems would ensue.

So now we have to consider this most terrifying of possibilities: sudden widespread catastrophic warming. I would have considered what happened in Antarctica impossible, along with pretty much all climate scientists. But now that it has happened, what if it happened someplace else in the world?

Writing a simple-minded piece on what effects it would have locally would be pretty easy: Just say, “Death Valley, with a bit of Venus mixed in. And we’re all dead.”

Daniel in the Liars’ Den — The assault on science and sanity continues

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 17th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

The Guardian on February 14th had a story by Aliya Uteuova with this lede: “Nearly 15% of Americans don’t believe climate change is real, study finds.” The University of Michigan poll continued, “Denialism highest in central and southern US, with Republican voters less likely to believe in climate science.”

My first thought was that this was actually kind of reassuring. Thirty percent of Americans don’t know the Earth revolves around the sun. Forty percent believe in angels. This poll showed that only one in seven respondents were total idiots who couldn’t see irrefutable evidence even as it was biting them on the ass.

It’s been quite a while since I stopped assuming climate denialists—the remaining ones—were acting in any sort of good faith. The ones remaining are getting more strident, perhaps reflecting the more intense propaganda emanating from the filthy fuels industries and the rightwing thinktanks. Certainly I am encountering more in social media, and seeing peripheral effects from the constant attacks on people acknowledging climate change.

Some are easy to ignore. The moment someone starts babbling about how climate change can’t exist because god swill and puny humans can’t change the divine plan, I just block them. They are at best delusional and at worst total morons, and no amount of logic or persuasion is going to convince them that I’m anything other than hellbound, along with Taylor Swift and Joe Biden.

Some parrot the same talking points we’ve been hearing for the past forty years. Climate change isn’t because of volcanoes, sunspots, Milanković cycles, end of an ice age, orbital perturbations, yada yada yada.

If I’m not busy, I’ll stick around to politely and firmly refute the points made. Even if I’m not feeling particularly charitable, I know this approach is by far the most effective. Usually they just run away. Being polite and earnest stymies trolls and confuses the more strident ones who think they can annoy the opposition into making silly mistakes.

Lately, I’ve seen more blatant lies. For instance one claim I saw was that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere dropped by 20% during the pandemic-related shutdown.

Well, that would be lovely. Having the concentrations drop to 340ppm would ensure a habitable Earth 50 years from now. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. The rate of increase dropped by 20% in 2019, but that meant concentrations only increased from 417ppm to 419ppm.

Another claim was that the Harvard Climatology Department had PROVED that the only reason Earth was warming was because we were coming out of an ice age. Needless to say, nobody at Harvard has made any such claim, and the records indicate that, if anything, we probably would be going into an ice age about now.

However, with greenhouse gases at their current levels, no ice ages are in the offing, no matter what they might do for Ray Romano’s career.

But it’s the residual ripple effects of the propaganda that can be the most pernicious. The public at large has a mistrust of scientists, one carefully fostered by fundamentalists, oil-industry flacks, and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, ie, the galaxy of think tanks, radio show hosts, big churches, and Faux news and its clones, and the poison blogosphere.

The other day, just as a reminder that their standard tactics of smearing and lying have become more expensive, climate scientist Michael Mann won a million-dollar defamation suit against conservative bloggers who accused him of falsifying data and once compared him to a convicted child abuser.

A few days ago, I passed along a link to an article that Stanford Magazine did about Dr. Daniel Swain to some friends. It was a good article, and Swain’s expertise would be useful for that group.

But I got one response that caused my jaw to drop. “He’s a media whore,” my friend wrote.

Now, my friend has been a bit tetchy ever since the Dodgers signed Ohtani and Yamamoto. And while the article itself was well done, the magazine cover was, to put it mildly, a bit over the top. It portrayed a colossal Daniel Swain a good half a mile tall, striding through heavily-forested foothills, his head well above the clouds. I could see where someone might detect a slightly fawning note from Stanford, based on that cover. And from that, it could be inferred that it suggested the sort of treatment Swain might be expecting from the press.

Except I’ve been a regular on his blog, weatherwest.com, for most of a decade. I was familiar with his style and approach from before he became famous. (The way he became famous was unlikely in the extreme. In trying to describe a persistent blocking high in the Gulf of Alaska that was causing a massive drought in California, he coined the phrase “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.” It caught the popular imagination. Now, only Swain knows if he ever actually sought fame, but I seriously doubt he sat up in bed one restless night and shouted, “I know! I’ll coin an awkwardly alliterative analogy! Eureka!”)

Swain does appreciate the opportunity to convey his expertise to the world. He puts in long hours doing just that—not just interviews, but in serious scholastic research and considerable effort in keeping his relatively small audience on his blog well informed, and encourages others of similar expertise to contribute freely.

I know a couple of people who are well known and who are media whores. They constantly self-promote, resent anything resembling competition, and pretend they have the answers. They’re depressingly easy to spot. I find them annoying.

But Swain is not one of them.

Indeed, the same day I had that email exchange, he did one of his “office hours” on YouTube. Anyone watching those quickly realizes that this is not a man basking in the effusive glow of public acclaim. As he often does, he was fielding questions from the chat thread, and he got one about Rossby waves. Those are defined as a “large horizontal atmospheric undulation that is associated with the polar-front jet stream and separates cold polar air from warm tropical air.” per Brittanica. There’s a hypothesis that decreasing ice cover in the Arctic Ocean and subsequent warming has caused the waves to increase in amplitude and decrease in frequency, allowing polar air to sweep into the middle latitudes. It caught the media’s fancy, since it was a handy explanation of big cold snaps in the midst of a warming climate. I admit I’ve based arguments on that myself.

Swain said that while he generally accepted the thinking behind the hypothesis, there just wasn’t any solid evidence that it was happening at this time. It was a very ‘Daniel’ sort of answer. If there isn’t a solid, concrete answer, he won’t hesitate to say so, and go on to discuss the elements that prevent a hard-and-fast answer. It’s exactly the sort of response a responsible scientist would give.

Certainty in the face of randomness and complexity is the mark of a charlatan.

But it’s not an answer a media whore—or any whore—should give. Don’t tell the marks what they need to know; tell them what they want to hear! It’s rule number one. If I was Swain’s unscrupulous agent, I would draw him aside and say, “Son, you’re doing it all wrong. I say, I say, son, you don’t get the return business if you’re saying things to the John like ‘You call that loving, mister? You sound like a Yugo with a flat tire!’ or ‘Oh, come on. That thing looks like the ghost of a poison mushroom. Can’t you at least paint it orange like the original?’ Nah, you gotta make them happy. Make ‘em feel big, y’know? Now, let’s hear your ecstatic moan.”

OK, he wouldn’t benefit from having me as an agent. Or as he might put it, I would be a “piss poor pimp.”

So why does a guy who normally is responsible, reasonably liberal, and scientifically literate declare a scientist who is the antithesis of a publicity hound a “media whore?”

Inculcation. Propaganda. The public at large is inclined to assume the worst of any responsible figure who challenges the present public gestalt.

That current gestalt is very toxic indeed. It’s pervasive, and manages to be both blatant and subtle at the same time. People honestly believe George Soros is giving scientists billions of dollars to push us all back to the stone age by destroying technology. And people don’t realize the people promoting such ideas are spending billions in order to protect trillions in profits made at our expense. It has to stop.

There’s no quick cure to it. It will take time. The parties dumping the poison into public discourse have to be called out, again and again, their lies shown for what they are, and the vacuity of their attacks exposed.

George Orwell once said, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” He also said, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” It is not the freedom to say two plus two make five.

Be a revolutionary. Tell the truth, no matter how much people don’t want to hear it. Be like Dr. Daniel Swain.

In America, the number of people accepting the truth of climate change has climbed to 85%. Keep telling the truth, and truth will prevail.

Atomic Batteries — Mass Production is at hand

Atomic Batteries

Mass Production is at hand

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

January 23rd, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Betavolt, a Chinese battery company, this week announced it was beginning mass production of a battery about the size of a microdisk and about 3 mm thicker that can produce 100 microWatts at three Volts—for 50 years.

While the concept behind the battery isn’t new—the US was making ‘atomic batteries’ in the early 1960s—it is the first to meet Chinese health and safety regulations, such as they are, for mass production.

This particular battery uses an isotope of nickel, Ni-63, encased in a proprietary wafer of diamond dust as a semiconductor. According to Betavolt, the unit won’t leak radiation even if punctured or gunshot. Preliminary tests indicate that the units, intact, are at normal background levels.

The units can be run in groups, either serial or parallel configurations. So, according to Betavolt, they can be used for such things as “aerospace, AI devices, medical, MEMS systems, intelligent sensors, small drones, and robots – and may eventually mean manufacturers can sell smartphones that never need charging.” Betavolt intends to have a much beefier model available in 2025 that can produce a full watt at 3 volts.

This is a breakthrough and has a strong potential to be what the tech bros like to call “disruptive.” It packs an energy density ten times that of lithium batteries, and isn’t affected by temperatures. “Unlike traditional batteries, this nuclear battery operates safely under extreme conditions, from temperatures of 120 to minus 60 degrees Celsius (248 to minus 76 Fahrenheit), and is resistant to punctures and gunfire without catching fire or exploding,” according to Science and Technology Daily. Tesla owners in the northeast will probably be interested to hear that.

The building blocks are plentiful. Ni-63 is easy to make from Ni-62, which is very plentiful, and there’s no shortage of diamond dust, which can be found naturally or synthetically. So mass production is feasible. Ni-63 has a half-life of 100.1 years, so the 50-year lifespan of the battery assumes about a 20% loss of power over that time period. Ni-63 decays into copper.

Of course, there is a downside. While considered a “low-level” contaminant by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and thus safe for near-surface disposal, it is Class C, which is the highest level of that overall designation. The NRC adds, “Class C waste is waste that not only must meet more rigorous requirements on waste form to ensure stability but also requires additional measures at the disposal facility to protect against inadvertent intrusion. The physical form and characteristics of Class C waste must meet both the minimum and stability requirements set forth in § 61.56.”

Physical Characteristics

  • Half-life: 100.1 years
  • Emissions: Beta particles with a maximum energy of 66 keV and an average energy of 17 keV
  • Maximum Range: 5 cm in air; < 0.01 cm in tissue

Dose Rate and Shielding

  • Dose rate to the skin at 10 cm: negligible (for an unshielded point source)
  • Dose rate to epidermal basal cells from skin contamination of 1 µCi/cm2: negligible
  • Shielding: None needed.
  • Annual Limit on Intake (ALI): 9000 microcuries via ingestion and 2000 microcuries via inhalation. The ingestion of one ALI will produce a dose of 5 rem.

Detection

A wipe survey using liquid scintillation counting is the preferred method for detecting Ni-63. G-M detectors will not detect Ni-63 contamination.

Precautions:

Ni-63 contamination cannot be detected with a G-M meter, and special precautions are needed to keep the work environment clean. The regular use of wipe testing, using a liquid scintillation counter, is the only way to insure that your work space does not contain low-level removable contamination.

Radiation Monitoring Requirements: Radiation monitoring badges are not required for Ni-63 users, since the monitoring badges will not detect Ni-63.

Waste Disposal:

  • Solid Wastes/Liquid Scintillation Wastes: through the Off-Site Radioactive Waste Disposal Program
  • Liquid Wastes: through the Sewer Disposal Program. The laboratory disposal limit for Ni-63 is 3 mCi per month.

     

A paper by Chinese physicists (Effective separation and recovery of valuable metals from waste Ni-based batteries: A comprehensive review by ie Wang, Yingyi Zhang, Laihao You, Kunkun Cui, Tao Fu and Haobo Mao and curated by The School of Metallurgical Engineering, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan, 243002, Anhui Province, China, and School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Anhui University of Technology, Maanshan, 243002, Anhui, China) states flatly, “On the one hand, waste Ni-based batteries cause serious harm to the environment and human health. On the other hand, they contain many valuable metals such as Ni, Co, Mn, Zn, and rare earth elements (REEs). These valuable metals and REEs have very high strategic value and are widely used in high-temperature structural materials to improve their mechanical properties and oxidation resistance.”

The paper goes on to detail several methods of disposal/recycling that can be used to mitigate what otherwise would be a significant environmental and safety hazard. These vary in both cost and effectiveness.

So while this is a significant step forward, it isn’t without challenges and drawbacks. Yes, the batteries as units seem safe and effective, but in mass production present major possible problems.

Expect to be hearing much more about this.

Sources:

Princeton Environmental Health ^ Safety

https://ehs.princeton.edu/laboratory-research/radiation-safety/radioactive-materials/radioisotope-fact-sheets/nickel-63

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1385894722012670

Quadrophobia — Working the Numbers

Quadrophobia

Working the Numbers

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 26th, 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

In the huge uproar surrounding the sudden sacking, and even more unexpected rehiring of Sam Altman at ChatGPT, and the revitalization of discussion over the benefits and perils of Artificial Intelligence, there was a throw-away line in one article that seized my attention.

The line stated, with no elaboration, that their AI program had solved a math formula problem that it hadn’t seen before. Being a mainstream media source, it didn’t elaborate, since numbers bigger than about six hurt readers, make branes hurt.

Michael Parekh on his blog “AI: Reset to Zero” elaborated in a much more meaningful way:

“In the following months, senior OpenAI researchers used the innovation to build systems that could solve basic math problems, a difficult task for existing AI models. Jakub Pachocki and Szymon Sidor, two top researchers, used Sutskever’s work to build a model called Q* (pronounced “Q-Star”) that was able to solve math problems that it hadn’t seen before, an important technical milestone. A demo of the model circulated within OpenAI in recent weeks, and the pace of development alarmed some researchers focused on AI safety.

“The work of Sutskever’s team, which has not previously been reported, and the concern inside the organization, suggest that tensions within OpenAI about the pace of its work will continue even after Altman was reinstated as CEO Tuesday night, and highlights a potential divide among executives. (See more about the safety conflicts at OpenAI.)

“Last week, Pachocki and Sidor were among the first senior employees to resign following Altman’s ouster. Details of Sutskever’s breakthrough, and his concerns about AI safety, help explain his participation in Altman’s high-profile ouster, as well as why Sidor and Pachocki resigned quickly after Altman was fired. The two returned to the company after Altman’s reinstatement.” ( https://michaelparekh.substack.com/p/ai-doing-the-reasoning-math-reliably )

Solving previously unseen math problems is HUGE. It involves extrapolative logic, something computers have not been able to accomplish. The vast majority of humans can’t manage that. I’m going to give you an example:

3 + 14t − 5t2 = 0

OK, most of you will recognize that with widely varying degrees of fondness from middle school or perhaps high school. It’s called a quadratic, and it was a sneaky introduction to the basics of calculus. Most teachers couldn’t be arsed to explain what those were for back in my day, and the best ones would come up with seemingly incoherent examples, such as measuring the perimeter area of a room around a carpet, or what happens if you toss a ball in the air at a certain speed. There are, in fact, a lot of occupations where they can be massively useful, but for most students they were just an annoying form of sudoku. Just to add to the general merriment, quadratics had two solutions, one of which was physically impossible. In this case, the solutions are t =−0.2 or t = 3. Three is the one that is possible. You could make a graph from quadratics which is where my brane broke and it had to be sent off to the knackers. I was left with a choice: be an innumerate annoying smart-ass, or be a Republican. You decide.

Now suppose you had never ever seen a quadratic before in your life. Would you be able to figure out what its purpose was? From that, could you solve it, knowing you would have to factor it and possibly use the imaginary number i, the square root of minus one?

Hell, most of you DID take quadratics in grade seven, taught by Ben Stein’s boring brother, and you couldn’t even begin to start on it. I did, but I admit I looked up the answer to make sure I hadn’t embarrassed myself. Just don’t ask me to draw a chart. The results would probably be painful for both of us.

OK, so this algorithm looked at some math function it hadn’t seen before, and, understanding only the variables, the operatives, and the numbers themselves, worked out the correct answer on its own. I don’t know that it was a quadratic that was the formula or what, but it represents a huge step forward, the first time a computer has demonstrated autonomous intellectual logic.

There are a lot of very genuine concerns about AI (I recently read a very good SF novel about an AI tasked with preparing the North American West Coast against a Cascadian fault movement of 9.0, forestalling the quake itself by planned explosives and moving fifty or so million people out of harm’s way. Someone made the horrible mistake of feeding the AI a concept of Occam’s Razor, “The simplest solution is usually the best.” Armed with that, the AI realizes the smart and efficient thing is to just let ‘er rip, cost less, and have much less rebuilding to do afterward because there would be less people. So it let the earthquake proceed.)

Of course AI has been a popular notion in SF going back to the first robot novel, “RUR,” back in 1927. Even in the 60’s, it was assumed that if you just gave a computer enough processing power and data, it would “wake up,” like Mycroft Holmes (Mike) in Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.” It’s clearly much more involved then that (even back then, I viewed the “wake up” notion as being similar to stacking hamburger meat seven feet high and getting a basketball player).

But it also appears that the point of self-awareness is now very near, and autonomous decision making really does need something like Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

  • The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  • The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  • The Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

If we want machines to have autonomous judgment, we need to up our game and have some autonomous judgment of our own. Asimov made a career of finding loopholes and workarounds in his own three laws. For us, the work will be far more difficult, and the consequences far further reaching.

Money for Nothing — A quantum quandary

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 25th, 2023

A few years back, a religious friend of mine wondered if, by being an atheist, I might be suffering from a lack of imagination. How, she wanted to know, could I look at the wonder and diversity of the universe and not see God’s hand in it?

Well, OK. I have the type of sense of humor where I played with saying, “The universe? What a lame thing! Just a big old nothingburger! I could have designed better with a compass and a blunt pencil!”

Of course, if you want to look at all of existence and ascribe it to one deity, or many, or none, all answers are equally valid. But anyone who claims to unequivocally KNOW the answer is either delusional or lying.

But my friend’s line of thinking was readily apparent. If the universe proved the existence of God, then the existence of God proved the inerrancy of the Bible. I pointed out that the Biblical view of the universe was that stars were just little pinpricks of light in the sky, perhaps a couple of miles up, and their only role was to provide shepherds and goatherders with a rough calendar so they could make their seasonal migrations. Not very imaginative. Then I quoted Arthur C. Clarke at her: “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we CAN imagine.” I don’t think she got it, and we essentially just agreed to disagree.

I began to understand how little we really know back in the seventh grade, when our science teacher gave us a quiz. You had to answer true or false to ten statements, which included “The solar system has nine planets and 31 moons” or “Sol is the only star that has planets” or “Earth is the only planet with life.” All ten reflected the state of scientific knowledge in 1963—and all ten were false. Two of the three examples have been definitely proven false, and the other one has no correct answer. No answer means not true. I scored 100%–the only student to do so, and the teacher was annoyed, surmising—correctly, as it happened—that someone had warned me what the answers he wanted were. A friend from an earlier class had given me a heads’ up. I wonder what that teacher would think if he knew that his irritation (I didn’t get punished) would contribute to a lesson I would remember clearly 60 years later. Isn’t that the sort of thing good teachers dream of accomplishing?

That same teacher taught us that light behaved both like a wave and a particle which in its own right was a challenging concept to grasp. He spared us the mind-blowing punchline which is that light behaves like a particle or a wave depending on if anyone is watching it or not. Yes, one of the fundamental properties of the universe exhibits physical characteristics like those found in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

The latest scientific theory offered to explain this is called quantum nonlocality, which is a notion that a photon can be both a wave and a particle because it’s in two places at once, ‘each’ having the one set of characteristics. Yeah, in this case ‘each’ has to be in scare quotes. It’s a bifurcation of reality that occurs in quantum physics that goes by the name of ‘entanglement.’ A fellow named John Bell discovered that if you produce a pair of photons with the same spin, and you reverse the spin on one, the spin on the other also reverses. How did he do this? Well, that part’s simple. He just performed spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC), and polarization (analogous to spin) rotators are implemented by waveplates. Nothing you couldn’t do with a compass and a blunt pencil. And no, your guess is as good as mine. But he proved it happens. One paired photon replicates the spin of the other photon, no matter how far apart they are. Even more disturbingly, the reaction of the twin appears to be instantaneous, which means faster than the speed of light.

I would love to go back in time to visit that science teacher, show him the present state of scientific understanding, and have him devise a new list of T/F statements. I doubt it would much resemble that old 1963 list. For instance, the notion of dark matter existed back then, but the evidence that the universe couldn’t behave in the way it does, or even exist other than as a unvarying field of hydrogen atoms, didn’t happen yet. Most matter in the universe is matter we cannot detect. And yes, it had to precede the formation of regular matter.

The latest intellectual outrage perpetrated upon us poor fools is the concept of quantum energy teleportation. The notion was first proposed in 2008 by Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan. He was trying to prove that there was no such thing as quantum energy teleportation, and wound up concluding that his experiments showed that yes, it was possible at the quantum level. The idea didn’t make any waves (or particles) since it suggested the transfer, or worse, creation of energy out of a vacuum. ‘Money for nothing and your chicks for free” as the old Dire Straits song says. It was filed alongside perpetual motion machines and aether, and largely ignored.

But, according to this month’s Quanta magazine, Hotta has been vindicated. The article states, “Now in the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon.”

It ties in to the theory of dark energy, the notion that there is some sort of activity in a vacuum (and remember, your atoms are quite apart from one another and you are, in fact, 99.999% vacuum) that lies outside the universe of mass and energy.

Now, if my friend knew anything of the mysteries of the quantum universe, or even knew OF it, she could make a better case for the universe being guided or at least planned in some way. There’s one notion, a totally unscientific one since by its nature defies falsification. Superdeterminism. Paired photons don’t reverse spin by communicating, but because it was determined at the beginning of the universe that both would reverse spin at that very instant. It’s something that would appeal to the fundamentalist mind. But fundamentalism doesn’t leave much room for imagination—real imagination, and not the sort of imagining that translates to “why don’t you believe like I do?”

Still, my answer would have been the same. “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we CAN imagine.” And THAT requires imagination!

SOTU 2023 — Biden—his time

SOTU 2023

Biden—his time

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 7th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

I had been kind of ignoring the State of the Union address in recent years. They were pretty bland and formulaic under most presidents—yes, folks, the state of the union is strong and gawd bless the troops. And under Trump, as with most things under Trump, it was a grotesque travesty.

But I had a feeling I might want to watch this, and boy, am I glad I heeded that sense.

Biden staged a masterwork in challenging the GOP in the most conciliatory way possible. It was amazing to watch. He started out lavishing praise on the GOP for all the bipartisan legislation that got passed (some of which only had a handful of GOP votes and caused considerable discomfort amongst the Republicans, who really hate to be seen as cooperating with the Democrats in any way, shape or form.

Then he put the Republicans on the spot by making them sit on their hands while reciting facts that brought thunderous applause from Democrats and the vast majority of Americans watching: the twelve million new jobs, the lowest unemployment since 1969, the rise in working class pay, the explosion in domestic manufacturing jobs, the CHIPS act, the IRA, the COVID relief measures. Republicans had to show they oppose all those things.

Then he spoke about the deficit, which has been falling at record levels since he took office, and noted that a full quarter of the national debt had been racked up under “my predecessor.” While he hid it extremely well (I don’t want to play poker against Joe Biden) this last caused the MAGA caucus to lose their little minds and start screaming at him.

He didn’t try to shut them down, but then, why should he? HE wasn’t the one being embarrassed by them. Instead, he invited them to stop by the White House and he would give them the facts and figures.

He was able to goad the Coo-Coo Caucus a couple of more times, on abortion rights and gun control, and there were loud shouts of “order!” which is was interest to note came, not from Democrats (THEY weren’t embarrassed by these fools, either) but Republicans.

Biden, with surgical skill, went on to recite a number of issues where the majority of Republicans at least tacitly agree with him (debt ceiling, pay for school teachers, etc.) and and really worked the intraparty divisions that exist within the GOP. Biden put his thumb in the gap and twisted, mentioning securing the border and stopping fentanyl.

Watching Kevin McCarthy was a treat. Yes, I just said that. He isn’t a good poker player, and his growing discomfort over the antics of the MAGAts eventually turned into an open glare after the fifth or so outburst from the “Toilet Training is for Sissies” contingent.

So Biden managed the very neat trick of taking the role of “Together, we can make it work” and simultaneously opening the rift between the crazies and the rest of the country wider. And there was no duplicity involved, which is the amazing thing. He did it simply by saying what he had accomplished, what he wanted to accomplish, and why he wanted to do so, and watched as Voltaire’s prayer was answered. “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.” Biden defeated the zanies and zealots with the one weapon they cannot counter: sweet reason and even temperament.

It made for the most entertaining SOTU since the days of Clinton, and while the zanies aren’t going to shrivel up and blow away, Biden has done a tremendous job of defanging them by making the show their fangs in response to friendly overtures.

Listening to Huckabye now. She is a hero because her mom survived cancer, and Trump was the greatest leader in history, and Biden has surrendered to a Chinese balloon. She isn’t staging a great comeback. Trump was a great hero. OK, Huckster. Whatever. Not one word about policy or goals; just the usual pseudo-patriotic pablum mixed with the usual god-flogging. America is in danger and god hates us, waaaaugh!

So: all in all a satisfying evening.

One thing for sure: the people who caught the SOTU in order to hate-watch are going to find it a whole lot harder to dismiss Biden as senile or foolish. He’s neither, and he’s smarter than most of you.

Glass Onion — “You know a place where nothing is real”

Glass Onion

You know a place where nothing is real”

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 28th 2022

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Ben Shapiro didn’t like Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. He wrote on Twatter, “We only find out about the actual murder we’re supposed to investigate full one hour and 10 minutes into the film, as well as an entirely new backstory,” he complained.

Well, Benny, if you’re going to set yourself up as a film critic, you really ought to know something about the genre of film you are reviewing. This is what’s called a “murder mystery” or a “whodunnit.” Misdirection is one of the main elements in such films. The viewer is led in one direction, and if the filmmaker is honest (and in this instance they are extremely honest) then all the clues that would lead the viewer to the right deductions are there in plain sight.

But the main thing that upset Benny, protector of the privileged and sneerer at the non-privileged, was that the movie very clearly parodized, nay, MOCKED a titan of finance/industry/tech. One of the main characters is a billionaire who has an entire corporate empire, with dozens of inventions and new concepts to his credit, widely regarded as a great genius and, in his own estimation, a “disruptor,” someone who challenges and eventually supplants societal norms and the status quo.

While there are several dozen such creatures roaming the American landscape, there was little doubt in Shapiro’s mind that the movie targeted one particular tech scion: Elon Musk. I won’t argue that bit. Main showrunner Rian Johnson has said that he saw his billionaire, Miles Bron (Edward Norton), as an amalgamation of three different real-life characters. A partner of Bron’s was cheated of the fame and fortune of the Alpha network of companies, something we learn she played a greater role in creating than did Bron. One of the characters even says she got “social networked.” So: elements of Zuckerberg there. Bron also makes reckless and idiotic decisions, needlessly shafting the people he might need most as allies, and committing very public and conspicuous crimes secure in the belief that he is above social consequences. Donald Trump, anyone?

But most people spotted Elon Musk as the real-life exemplar of Miles Bron.

I thought about it. Rian Johnson and his crew probably began writing the script for this movie when Musk was still a public hero and inventor, supposedly, of the Tesla electric vehicle, genius behind Space X, and mastermind of such future wonders as the Boring tunnels and the Hyperloop. The first disturbing elements that caused people to question his personality and judgment, such as the flamethrower giveaway or the smearing of the rescuer of those children trapped in a Thai cave, had just come out.

But it took a lot more time for Musk to self-immolate, to the point where the larger segment of society realized he wasn’t a genius, wasn’t a leader, isn’t even particularly stable.

Indeed, I’m reading a book now, a well-done hi-tech spy thriller called “Portals” by Douglas E. Richards. Tech-aware and sophisticated, it holds Musk as an ongoing brilliant tech leader who has brought the world such marvels as humanoid AI Tesla robots and mind implants (and Musk is actually supposedly working on the latter, but has nothing to show for it but some 1,500 dead lab animals to date). For all Richards’ obvious savvy and political and tech awareness, his 2022 book still presents Musk as a tech wizard and leader. And, of course, that’s how Ben Shapiro sees Musk. He’s offended that anyone could even question it.

But in the movie’s denouement, Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) says of Bron: “His dock doesn’t float. His wonder fuel is a disaster. His grasp of disruption theory is remedial at best. He didn’t design the puzzle boxes. He didn’t write the mystery. Et voilà! It all adds up. The key to this entire case! And it was staring me right in the face. Like everyone in the world, I assumed Miles Bron was a complicated genius. But why? Look into the clear center of this Glass Onion… Miles Bron is an idiot!”

In the face of the Twitter débacle, the face of Musk is revealed. He wasn’t self-made, but is the heir to an emerald mine. He didn’t invent Tesla—he bought it out. For Space X, he just hired the right people and threw money at them. He’s an entrepreneur, which in the minds of America’s Shapiros is akin to being a genius leader, but he is neither a genius nor a leader. His Boring company which supposedly could drill tunnels four times faster than anyone else also only drilled a tunnel one half the diameter, thus displacing the same amount of dirt in the same time. His underground freeway system for LA was ridiculous on the face of it. His Hyperloop, based on proof-of-concept projects from the 1840s, has gone nowhere. He has an evil reputation as a union buster and workforce abuser. He insisted, for no good reason, that people work in close quarters during the most deadly stage of the coronavirus pandemic. The freedom of speech he promised for Twitter turned out to be the usual libertarian/fascist bullshit, in which free speech is for the rich and powerful only. Fascists for Free Speech, I call it.

So yes, Bron could be any of dozens of such monsters of American capitalism, but he’s most clearly Elon Musk.

Shapiro no doubt was dismayed that the hangers-on, Bron’s friends “The Disruptors” each represented a segment of American capitalist society. Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr) represented the commercial science segment, and was being pressured by Bron to sign off on an unproven and potentially hazardous new hydrogen-based energy substance called ‘Klear’. Clair Debella (Kathryn Hahn) was the political segment, a governor Bron gave a huge donation to in order to rush through a project for the first Klear power plant, Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) was a past-her-prime supermodel using the fashion industry to promote Bron’s ‘coolness,’ and Duke Cody, (Dave Bautista) was a blogger who is an incel/right winger who promotes men’s rights. Jay and Cody help Bron fight ‘wokeness’ by being politically incorrect (Jay was in hot water for describing a cheap person as ‘Jewy’ (not to be confused with another right wing moron who recently described his Catholic self as ‘Jew-ish’) and Cody always carries a large, ornate pistol that he likes to fire off randomly. Both appeal to the MAGAt crowd, of course.

Cody is also a cuckold and gets slapped around by a domineering if diminuitive mother and, it’s hinted, lives with mummy. I’m wondering if his character was the main reason Shapiro got so offended.

Glass Onion, like another movie earlier this year called Don’t Look Up, offends all the right people. It offends the far right, and it offends the people who still cling to the belief that fantastically rich billionaires are somehow beneficial to society and that because they are rich, they must be of superior intelligence, wisdom and morals. Even as Musk, Trump, Bezos and all the rest of the ultra-rich crowd prove that if anything, the opposite is true.

Glass Onion is a wildly entertaining movie, a first-class Agatha Christie-style whodunnit, and above all, a searingly sharp-edged social satire that comes along at just the right time. You can see it for yourself on Netflix.

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