What's holding us back, or down? A little sci-fi or maybe sci-real someday

 The December Musing From Long Hill column from the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine:

The election is over finally and up on Long Hill we are glad of it.  As of this writing, it is still being contested.  No matter, we can say with confidence, as we do after every quadrennial contest: The good news is one lost, the bad, one of them won.

Enough of such cynicism.  Let us discuss more pleasant topics such as climate disaster, again.

It is not that we have not gone over this before.  The Green New Deal and our skepticism about it have been written about, but we are always looking for the scary aspect of a looming cataclysm.  We have found one.

Think of the Earth as one big Easter Island.  Easter Island is a lonely spot in the Pacific where the people who first discovered the place stranded themselves so they could never leave.  It was a forested land that if managed well might have seen its expert Polynesian seafarers able to voyage the ocean as they had been doing.

Alas, the people cut down the trees without regard to what life would be like without them and could never leave. They would have to wait for others to find them and bring them diseases and enslave many of them.  They did create some intriguing stone statues they are famous for, not that that did them any good.

Well, according to economic researcher Chris Martenson, all the rest of us earthlings are on the same path of resource depletion as the islanders.  One might guess that would mean we shall never be able to get off the planet and are stuck where we are as were the Rapanui (i.e. native name of that people).

As I've never been able to get off the planet before, that has not been a worry up on Long Hill.  Mr. Martenson has a list of things we should be doing to stave off complete isolation.  In truth, a poorer human existence is in order if we do not wisely conserve resources.

On the next page, Chris has more, but as a stipend is required to go further, your columnist decided to practice some resource conservation.

Chris had alluded to peak oil, that is the end of petroleum as we use it up.  What to do?

Whenever the topic comes up, someone usually mentions electric cars as a solution.  China is big on electric cars.  Problem is there is no something for nothing in nature and you have to charge the batteries which means generating electricity and the method China uses for generation is coal because they have a lot of that toxic pollutant, and that too will be used up.

Nothing works perfectly and nuclear as an alternative is feared as the radioactive result lasts much closer to eternity than we do.  It will take a while, but the fuel for reactors runs out also.  So, it's back to Planet Easter Island.

There is a form of nuclear that does not pollute and "spits out more energy than it consumes" according to an October article in Livescience.  It's called fusion and it works by pushing atoms together rather than splitting them apart.

This would be a wonderful development.  The Livescience piece says we could be getting fusion electricity by 2025.  We're saved!

Fusion is a complicated process that produces teslas.  If you're thinking Elon Musk, you know even less science than I do.  A tesla is a measurement of a magnetic field, as well as a cute name for a car.

The fusion reactor produces heat that is used to make steam and generate more electricity than current power plants. 

There is, however, a small problem.  Fusion has been just around the corner since your columnist was a teenager.  That was not last week.  If your broker calls and says he has a hot fusion stock, don't take out a home equity for a flyer.

We can live in hope, and it might work out.  Even if it does, aircraft will still need fossils to fuel them.  Airplanes and rockets fly with petroleum products and so far, that's it.  The aforementioned Mr. Musk wants to go to Mars with a sizable population eventually.  His spacecraft only uses refined crude products, a lot of it.  Once it runs out, we'll never see our relatives again on the Red Planet.

Hydrogen is held out as the future fuel, but that, like fusion, is just around that same corner.

There is a way as prompted by our own official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of Pseudo Science (LHIfCPS for short).  What the Institute suggests is that we break the law, i.e. the Law of Gravity.

We are not the first to consider contravening gravity to travel through the air.  The idea has a place in literature.  The satirical masterpiece, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, features it in Part III where Gulliver encounters the floating island of Laputa

It is inhabited by a population of Stephen Hawkings whose heads are literally and figuratively in the clouds.

The island stayed in the air and was able to maneuver by the “magnetic virtue” of certain minerals.  Such a realm could only exist due to its defiance of gravity.  Alas, it does not happen in reality.

Newspapers are dying unless kept on life support with oligarch money infused (such as The Washington Post and New York Times).  It was not always so.  Whether or not the Twentieth Century was the greatest age of the broadsheet is open to question, but they were huge.  Almost all of them had a comics page.  As a boy, your columnist was a fan of many of the strips and loved Dick Tracy by Chester Gould.

Dick Tracy was a hard-boiled detective, but the strip had a sci-fi component.  His Two-Way Wrist Radio that evolved into the two-Way Wrist TV and eventually the two-Way Wrist computer foretold the smartphone.

One of Gould's inventions that never came to fruition was the Space Coupe.  The Space Coupe was a cylindrical vehicle that had antennae attached that could tap gravity to fly.  The Space Coupe voyaged to the moon and found a valley with a salubrious climate supporting human-like life forms.

Fantastic, but fun, gravity propulsion is one Gould speculation that has not happened...yet.

As doubtful as you may be as to our sanity, or for that matter, sobriety, actual real serious people have suggested the possibility of levitation.  Roger Babson, famous economic writer, entrepreneur and philanthropist was intrigued by the subject.  Babson had said of the stock market, what goes up must come down and he had the concept right, correctly anticipating the crash of 1929.  He ended up with a lot of money to fund his ideas.

His interest began when his sister drowned because, as he put it, “She was unable to fight gravity which came up and seized her like a dragon and brought her to the bottom." 

Babson further observed: “Gradually I found that ‘old man Gravity’ is not only directly responsible for millions of deaths each year, but also for millions of accidents” ... “Broken hips and other broken bones as well as numerous circulatory, intestinal and other internal troubles are directly due to the people's inability to counteract Gravity at a critical moment.”

The scientific community was not overly excited by what Babson was suggesting.  Undaunted, he would found the Gravity Research Foundation in 1947 after another family drowning.

Babson was a serious man, but his gravity shield and other ideas never got traction, maybe because no one would give it a real chance.

Still, the foundation gives out prizes for papers on gravity related subjects, though none of them are regarding the quest for the gravity shield that could take us to the stars.  The hope remains forlorn.

But, not for everyone.

The U.S. Navy has been granted a patent for a "Craft using an inertial mass reduction device." which kind of, sort of, means manipulation of magnetic forces and gravity.

Granted, the article reporting the advancement was in Metro, not exactly a science journal, but the link takes you to a google patents page.

Again, as a bastion of crackpot-science, we take hope up on Long Hill on the slimmest of possibilities.  The proposed Navy anti-gravity air and watercraft may never come to anything, but it is more fun than contemplating who will be inaugurated in January.

Review of Scott Horton's Fool's Errand from the December Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine.

Was This Trip Necessary?

Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan 

By Scott Horton

The Libertarian Institute, 2017

By Richard Morchoe 

Scott Horton, author of Fool's Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, begins the last section of the book thus: "The occupation of Afghanistan is not just America's longest foreign war.  It may also have the distinction of being both the least supported and least opposed war in our history."  Nineteen years on, it is a zombie conflict with its think tank and military supporters coming up with little rhyme or reason to be there other than to be there.

The people may not be following all that closely, but there is a constituency doing well, the suppliers of the war material are passionately supporting our sojourn over there.

Horton's Fool's Errand could be assigned as the text of a college survey course on our involvement even before the events of 911.  The book is exhaustively documented and foot noted.  Mr. Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute as well as editorial director of Antiwar.com.  He hosts Antiwar Radio Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los Angeles, California, and also a podcast, the Scott Horton Show from Scott Horton.org.

As he is associated with Antiwar.com, it would not be difficult to observe that he probably looks at our Afghan involvement with a critical eye, if the title, Fool's Errand did not give it away.

Full disclosure, your reviewer has contributed content to Antiwar.com and has a slight acquaintance with Mr. Horton.

It is not easy to make sense of the long engagement in Afghanistan, maybe because it can't make sense.  A cliché analogy would be it is a hall of mirrors and that is as good as any.  We have lurched from one bad decision to another.

It goes without saying that the events of 911 did not just happen out of the blue.  George Bush's comment about hating our freedom does not hold up, as a read of Scott's book would demonstrate.  The lack of reason is accentuated when the rationale that we have to "Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is used.  Even when an attack happens in the "homeland” (e.g. the Boston Marathon Bombing) the answer does not change.

So, what did cause certain denizens of the Islamic east to carry out the attack on the Twin Towers and set off almost two decades of war?

Scott Horton cites University of Chicago professor Robert Pape who undertook a study of Islam to figure out the cause of suicide terrorism.  He was shocked when he found out that it was not religion that led to the attacks, but reaction to foreign occupation.

People of other faiths would also resort to self-destruction as part of their resistance.  Not so long ago, the Tamils, who are not Muslims, fought a long war of liberation against the Sri Lankan state and would use the tactic.

Pape and his grad students built a database "of every suicide attacker on earth since 1980."  The findings; these are not losers who have given up on life.  "The single most significant factor in determining whether someone would commit an act of suicide terrorism was the presence of foreign combat forces on the attacker’s territory."

It would have been a good idea to think about how Arabs and Muslims might react to our troops on Saudi soil or the first war against Iraq.  Nah, just go with hate us for our freedom as motive.

Anyway, no matter the motive, the attack of 911 was, murder most foul.  The United States had every reason to demand the extradition of the perpetrators and if refused, take military action to apprehend them.

But, as Scott writes, there was a fly in that ointment.

The Taliban were, and one must assume, still are, serious about their religion.  They were, however, not in love with al Qaeda.  Three months before 911, Mullah Omar gave an interview to a western journalist in which he expressed his displeasure with bin Laden.

Granted, the Taliban refused to just hand over their guest, but they knew the man was a hot potato and they needed at least a fig leaf of accommodation to drop him.  They offered to turn bin Laden over to a third country.  We wanted him and that was that.

Were the Taliban just stalling?  Horton looks at the words of Milton Bearden who had been the CIA station chief running the covert war in the 1980s, "We never heard what they were trying to say.  We had no common language.  Ours was, 'Give up bin Laden.'  They were saying, 'Do something to help us give him up'..."  

That the Taliban was trying to dance away from bin Laden never made the news at the time.  Even if they were being cute, it is undeniable that the Bush administration would settle for nothing but absolute compliance.  

We could not take yes for an answer.

Horton goes into much detail, but suffice it to say in the words of Lincoln, "and the war came."

Even after the war started and, supposedly, finished, elements of the Taliban were trying to come to terms with the new regime and were rebuffed.  It should not have been a surprise when later on they would go back to war.

We were "nation building," but it did not seem to be going well.  Our lack of popularity among those we were uplifting was noted by journalist Chris Sands.  The insurgency may not have been an honorable enterprise, but Sands observed, "when civilians are killed by the Taliban in Kandahar, locals still blame the [U.S.-supported] government instead of the Taliban, who are "rarely the subject of the people's fury" in such circumstances."

The project seemed to be meandering such that Karzai, the president, was referred to as the Mayor of Kabul as the writ of the government did not seem to exceed the boundary of the capital.

What to do?  How about a surge, i.e. more troops?

This one would be different from the Iraq endeavor.  It would be baked in a think tank oven by "COINdistas."  COIN refers to Counter Insurgency warfare and it had its stars.

There were old neocon retreads as a supporting cast, but new faces were not wanting such as the Aussie COIN theorist, David Kilcullen.  General James Mattis, who would later become known for a role in the Trump administration, wrote the Counterinsurgency Field Manual, but the guy who really made his brand, such as it is, was General David Petraeus.

Petraeus was the man with a plan.  He and his confreres "promised Obama that with the plan they could have the Taliban sitting at the table, ready to concede to American terms within 18 months–by July 2011."  

That that did not happen was hardly an impediment to Petraeus.  He always claimed his escalation was working, with constant gains, albeit "fragile" and "reversible," which means not actual gains.

No matter that the resistance continued to grow, Dave's rep grew as well, until he and his amanuensis and mistress, Paula Broadwell, were caught sharing classified material.  He was slapped on the wrist with a misdemeanor conviction that might have been a felony for someone else.  Petraeus has not slunk away in disgrace, but is doing well.  You've heard of the term, "empty suit."  This guy was an empty uniform.

What is the point of it all?  Maybe there are riches beneath the soil, but the U.S., and certainly its people will not profit from them.  The Afghans will continue to extract wealth from the land in the form of opium, but your average Afghani will not become rich.

The Greek historian Herodotus related how the Spartan king, Pausanias, after the battle of Platea, contrasted the luxury of the captured Persian king's table as set for dinner and his own poor "spartan" supper.  Pausanias commented that the Persians had "come to rob us of our poverty."

Taliban members must think us that stupid.

History does not stop so, I reached out to Scott as to where we stand now.  He was kind enough to respond:

"Despite the fact that Donald Trump did not believe in the war in Afghanistan, in 2017, he sent more troops, and massively increased airstrikes, killing tens of thousands of people. He did so while at the same time successfully negotiating a withdrawal deal with the Taliban. The terms are that the U.S. will withdraw all combat forces by May 2021, as long as the Taliban agree not to allow international terrorists on their territory.

Joe Biden opposes this deal. He still wants to implement his plan from the Obama years: a garrison of thousands of "counter-terrorism" forces stationed there indefinitely.

Biden may or may not seek regime change against any more secular governments, but he certainly plans on continuing the "war on terrorism," which means war against troublesome radicals anywhere the U.S. military and CIA drone forces can find them from Nigeria to the Philippines.

In the seemingly unlikely chance that Trump is declared the winner of the election after-all, there will still be enormous pressure on him to cancel the deal and stay under the pretext of al Qaeda's return or the dangers of Afghan "ISIS."

Either way, the American people are going to have to insist that the deal is seen through and the U.S.'s role in that tragic war, and the rest of the terror wars, is finally brought to an end."

Darkness of The Sun

Below is my column as submitted to the editor of the Sturbridge Times Town & Country Living Magazine for the July, 2019 issue.

The drive from Long Hill to Sturbridge is routine, but barring some auto mishap, mostly pleasant.  At certain times of day, sunrise or sunset, it can be sublime.  There is a farm on the left that milks cows.  Out front is occasionally something for sale with small signage.

This June, there was a different type of sign up.  It was not on a poster nor did it look carefully drawn.  It consisted of two white wrapped hay bales with words written in black, "Stop the Solar Farm."  

Unless you drive with blinders on, you've seen them.  They seem to be situated on slopes that decline gradually to take advantage of the sun.  Whatever view existed previously is now completely obscured by banks of panels.  Sometimes, what seems a whole forest is uprooted to set it up.

The farmer who put up that bale sign appears to have had some unwanted controversy and announced his withdrawal from the battle on social media.

If instead of heading to Sturbridge one takes Brookfield Road towards Brimfield many more protest signs come into view on the right.  It turns out that the panels are to be set on a hill behind those dwellings. 

 Not everyone was going silent and social media had leads to other opponents.

Krista Virchow is a longtime resident and her sister lives next door.  She will be directly affected and when I spoke with her, her voice was emotional and the concern was heartfelt.  Krista with deep roots elsewhere, chose to live along Brookfield Road saying "my home is my life."

I spoke to Krista's brother-in law, Mike Burke, who said one day heavy equipment arrived to build an access road through the driveway Krista and Mike and his wife share.  He was able to send them off, but that will hardly be the end of it.  The forested hill is to be clear cut.

The solar company made Krista and her sister an offer of $3,000 each for 25 years to use the right of way between their neighboring houses.  They might have been trying some divide and conquer tactics as they also offered one sibling $6,000 for an easement.

Mike told me of the fortune being offered to the landowners who will be able to move away while all their neighbors are stuck.

There was a meeting at the town hall on June 17th with lots of questions and few answers and it is to be continued.  It turns out, there are other solar farms on tap for Warren.  Townspeople are in for a long fight.

Can the little guys win?  The odds are not good.  Over in Monson, a similar battle has been going on since 2016 and it is not over yet.  Jessica Lee Allen is a daughter of the town and lifelong resident.  It also appears that she is the point person in the opposition.

It is from Jessica I first heard the term, "Big Solar."  We've all heard of Big Pharma (much in the news with the Opioid crisis), Big Tech, the Big Banks, et al.  When you put Big in front of an industry, it signals a negative.

It is hard to blame Ms. Allen for the way she feels.  She and other citizens voted it down on August 22, 2016, but the Big Solar Company saw that coming and filed what is known as an ANR or Approval Not Required on the 17th to get the project grandfathered.

It appears enterprises that are part of Big Solar and their legal teams learn from each project while for the small-town folk who want to resist, it is always, as one might say, "the first rodeo."

Supposedly, the Monson solar farm, though built, does not have final approval to be running.  Something is happening as Jessica and her mom hear an audible hum coming from the project.  I heard it too when I visited the array.

In an inquiry to Mass DOER (Department of Energy Resources) to find out if there were any subsidies to the project we came up empty, as the state agency claimed no knowledge of a project at the stated address.  DOER did acknowledge one down the street that became operational in February of this year, but according to Jessica, that address does not exist.

As it is, Jessica and the team fight on though the panels are up and humming.

In an interesting and informative book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, Professor David Goodstein surveyed the forms of energy available on this earth and what they can do for us.  The tone of his book is pessimistic.

Dr. Goodstein is a professor of physics and applied physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), one of the premier scientific universities in the world, and no diploma mill.  Maybe the man is not infallible, but he is hardly making anything up.

If civilization is to survive, solar will be huge, if not the major part of the equation.  From Out of Gas, it is clear, we are not there yet.  Advances are being made, but compared to what we need, the state of the art is primitive.

We can see some evidence of that just by reading or listening to ads for rooftop solar.  If it were perfected, there would not be the need to push tax incentives to homeowners to panel the roof.  Your columnist has looked into it for his residence, but though there are some good reasons, the benefits are not that large, at this time.

In the April issue of this magazine, supergrids were discussed.  A supergrid can take power from a region where it is easier to generate and transport it to where it is not with minimal loss in transmission.  Clearly, New England is not where generation is easy. 

The future is solar and so was the past.  All life depends on the sun, but that will take a big improvement in Photovoltaic technology to make it truly worthwhile locally.

The future is also a "waste management issue," according to Garvin Heath, a senior scientist at the Renewable Energy Laboratory.  The panels do not have an overly long use life and then they must be disposed of and that is its own "green" issue. 

Rest assured the executives from Big Solar have no intention of helping out with that task.