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Open thread 4/2/24 — 36 Comments

  1. A step closer to limitless clean energy? Nuclear fusion reactor breaks record after hitting 100 MILLION degrees (C or 180 million°F) for almost 50 seconds – seven times hotter than the sun’s core – know nothing about it other than it has been worked on for a long & effort seems worth it.

    Rival China’s ‘artificial sun’ nuclear fusion reactor ran for over 17 minutes but at a lower temperature – 126 million°F (70 million°C).

    Incredible moment Russian convoy is destroyed and Vlad’s troops are forced to retreat in ‘one of the largest attacks on tanks of the Ukraine war’ – hard to believe that America is not helping these poor FREEDOM seekers & incredible fighters more!?

    This PC is likely operated by a technical master! – tweet from X account—after latest test results from UserBenchmark. Build my own desktop PCs & it will take a week to get my ego behind me again (‘Get Thee Behind Me, Satan’)… 🙂

  2. Very bad Southern accent. Didn’t think the Canadian, Aussie and NZ were that accurate either. But, still, amazing.
    When we use to travel we were often mistaken for Canadian because of our flat Midwestern accent (Wife, born in CO, all her life here. Me, Dad was in the Navy so we moved around a lot)

  3. Martin Gurri, famous for his book “The Revolt of the Public,” has written a long essay on the collapse of Cuba’s government into nothing more than a mafia. Everybody in Cuba knows it, and the country’s leaders don’t even bother to pretend anymore. Gurri believes that the mafia stage signals the end of communism in Cuba.

    Worth reading. Here’s a link: https://tinyurl.com/vu2mc453

  4. Speaking of a government degenerating (or should that be “progressing”?) into “nothing more than a mafia”…with sincere apologies to all genuine mafiosi….

    “IN THE HUNTER BIDEN CASE”
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/04/in-the-hunter-biden-case.php
    Opening grafs:

    Hunter Biden moved to dismiss the criminal tax charges pending against Hunter Biden in federal court (the Central District of California). Indeed, Biden attorney Abby Lowell filed eight motions to dismiss the charges. Judge Mark Scarsi — a Trump appointee — denied the motions…[writing]:

    “As the Court stated at the hearing, Defendant filed his motion without any evidence. The motion is remarkable in that it fails to include a single declaration, exhibit, or request for judicial notice. Instead, Defendant cites portions of various Internet news sources, social media posts, and legal blogs. These citations, however, are not evidence.”

    Professor Jonathan Turley quotes this passage…

    To be fair, one could ask, SINCE WHEN does a Biden ever need any evidence for anything…? Ergo, WHY should a Biden be requested to provide any?
    So it does indeed look like “The Smartest Guy I Know”(TM) has a point here…see, if you never have to….

    Hold on: “nothing more than a mafia”?
    One might well be inclined to believe that a Party that hijacks the USA and exploits its power for its own nefarious, destructive purposes is much, much more than a mafia….

  5. I’ve been hearing about fusion, the energy of the future, all of my adult life. Fifty seconds is indeed a lot longer than any previous efforts, but I have a feeling that in my remaining perhaps twenty years the new designs in fission reactors are the way to go.

  6. And, no fooling, it’s nice to refresh Neo’s main page and NOT see Jill and Doug. 🙂

  7. The far is like the pla and irgc they are in charge

    Evers was that guy in prizzis honor or poltergeist 2

  8. Kate, we are only 10 years from having commercial nuclear fusion power. We have been only 10 years away for over 40 years.

  9. Very bad Southern accent.

    SHIREHOME:

    “It’s not as bad as Dick Van Dyke’s Cockney in ‘Mary Poppins’, he said, damning with faint praise.

  10. Unfortunately, 7 international aid workers have apparently been killed in an Isreali drone strike of a convoy. The IDF was acting on intelligence that lead them to believe a terrorist was a part of the convoy. I have little doubt that it was the result of some viscious counterintelligence on the part of Hamas. Not only is this obviously a human tragedy but also it is a huge PR victory for Hamas. I’ve no doubt that this will be the lead story in the MSM for at least the next 24 to 48 hours.

  11. Are you sure, really sure, they were just Aid Wokers, working for a real aid group, that Hamas wasn’t using?

  12. Banned Lizard – ‘Say what again, I dare you, I double dare you‘ 😉

    Gaza is a War Zone…

    Great point SHIREHOME…

    Israel needs to pick up the pace since people are apparently starting to feel safe in Gaza.

  13. We would have had fusion-powered flying cars by now if people would just start eating the bugs.
    _________

    Mickey Kaus says that some antacids he was on carry greater risk of dementia — and that Biden has been taking one of them for some time. My dad popped Gelusil like they were candy with no ill effects, so they may be okay.

  14. The WSJ reports that Israel has been coordinating with this food relief group, acknowledges that this strike was in error, and is launching an investigation to find out how this went wrong. Israel, unlike Hamas, regrets civilian deaths and tries to avoid them.

    This is a war zone, and people do die in wars. RIP.

  15. I only hope that less famous and less wealthy Scots will also be able to avoid penalties under this insane law.

  16. Banned Lizard:

    Just a moment of easy research would have told you that Dr. Bossche (that supposed “top virulogist” at the link you posted) has been singing the disaster tune for at least three years. The very opposite has occurred of what he predicted earlier as disaster: in fact, unlike his prediction, the variants have become milder over time rather than more virulent. Now he’s making a slightly different prediction in terms of the details of how the COVID vaccine debacle will work, but his track record on all of this is abysmal. This is his particular niche: the end of the world as we know it through COVID vaccinations.

  17. Cornflour (near the top) mentions and links to Martin Gurri on Cuba’s decline into mafia style gang rule.

    Last week, I saw a video report on Sky News Australia video update on Cuba (via YouTube).

    It was shocking to hear the stomping of dissent since 2021. But today people care less and less about “authorities” threats because so many are in the verge of famine.

    Malnutrition is the widespread threat — and rebellion by the starving.
    I’m also shocked that I’m never getting such detail and data from US sources.

  18. For those of you following the story of the Key bridge collapse in Baltimore, a new shipping channel out of the Baltimore harbor was opened yesterday by the Coast Guard. It goes under one of the spans of the bridge still standing. It can’t accommodate deep-draft vessels, but it will allow passage of barges, so grain, coal, steel, etc. will get through.

  19. Neo:

    My hopes are “boosted” by your Bossche advisory. It sounds like his credibility is no better than the “Winter of Death and Severe Illness” baloney dished by Team Joe.

  20. Computer problems yesterday prevented me from responding to this then, so if I may do so now…

    ”The reality is it’s unlikely Ukraine will get all of its territory back– especially Crimea.”

    Crimea will be the next part of Ukraine to be liberated (well, OK, maybe the part of Kherson across the Dnieper river on the way to Crimea). The Kerch Strait bridge has already been hit twice, and the rail line across it is operating at reduced capacity. The rail line through the so-called land bridge between Russia and Crimea is now within artillery range of the Ukrainians, meaning running logistics supply across those rails is like running a gauntlet. That means that resupply has to be done by truck (which the Russians don’t have enough of, because they don’t normally do logistics that way) or by boat.

    Supplying Crimea by boat has been problematic for the Russians. Ukraine has hit Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol multiple times, destroying its headquarters, its backup headquarters, its primary drydock, a submarine and amphibious cargo ship in the drydock, and several other ships. As a result, Russia has pulled most of its warships out of Sevastopol and retreated to either Freedosia on the southeastern Crimean coast, or all the way back to Novorossyssk.

    Since then Ukraine has hit the naval base at Freedosia and the naval shipyard at Kerch, destroying several other warships. About half of Russia’s amphibious cargo ships in the Black Sea have been destroyed, and Turkey won’t let Russia bring more ships in. Just recently Ukraine hit two more of Russia’s large amphibious cargo ships, though this time the damage appears so have been relatively minor.

    It’s a slow grind, but Ukraine is whittling away at Russia’s logistics capacity and slowly making Russia’s hold on Crimea untenable. Russia is already in jeopardy of losing its status as the top naval power on the Black Sea (done in by a country without a navy). It’s only going to get worse for Russia from here.

  21. Another point:

    ”Ukraine has shifted some of it’s[sic] efforts to building defensive lines that can be defended against a potential Russian spring offensive. They’ve avoided this up to now because that’s not the tactic you use when your goal is pushing Russia out of Ukrainian territory.”

    Ukraine has wisened up. American aid dropped off a cliff in July 2023 (not long after the start of Ukraine’s offensive) and stopped altogether in December. As a result, Ukraine doesn’t have the weapons to mount a large-scale offensive of its own so has instead switched to a slower attritional, more strategic style of warfare.

    The end result will be the same, but it will take longer. A lot longer. Probably 4-6 years.

    Russia is losing about 70-80,000 KIA in Ukraine each year, but about 800,000 Russian men turn 18 each year. So as long as Russia has the will to lose 10% of its male graduating seniors each year — and it appears to have the will to do that indefinitely — Russia will not run out of men.

    What it will run out of is tanks (and artillery). Russia started this latest invasion with about 2,800 tanks in active service and about 10,000 in storage. So far it’s lost at least 3,000 tanks, 4,000 pieces of artillery, and 5,000 armored personnel carriers. While Russia can still manufacture its own tank chassis and engines, due to sanctions it is having difficulty making the hi-tech parts of tanks such as radios, targeting computers, and modern optics.

    As a result, almost all of its “new” tanks come about by taking some of those 10,000 Soviet-era tanks out of storage and refurbishing them. From what I’ve been reading, about 40% of those tanks in storage are piles of rust and completely unusable. But that leaves about 6,000 more tanks available for Russia to lose in Ukraine.

    But when those are gone, that’s it. There won’t be any left. You would think Russia would stop before it completely runs out of tanks, but then I thought the Russians would stop before they lost 150,000 men, so here we are.

    By building defensive lines, Ukraine is showing it has the will to fight for the long haul. It is also showing it will continue to fight without American aid. Cutting off that aid will not end the war — not in a day, not in a year, not ever. It will only make the war longer and more deadly.

    That’s a result worth crying over. Some people are celebrating it.

  22. mkent: thanks for the info. People forget that Ukraine has been fighting Russia since 2014. Wonder why Trump didn’t stop it when he had a chance? Did he even know it was going on during his 4 years?! 😉

    During the early reinvasion of 2022, Ukraine exposed the incredible weaknesses in the Russian military—thanks to the action of Putin and his cronies. That was and is invaluable information for America & NATO.

    Ukraine was fighting, and winning, before America ever sent one artillery shell to them.

    I have lost all respect for the Republican party (and Trump!) over their pro-Russia stance against Ukraine…

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