Hugging Face

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Singularity is here. 

The concept of a technological singularity as it is known today is largely credited to Dr. Vernor Vinge, a mathematician, computer scientist, and science fiction author who is best known for his Hugo award-winning novel, A Fire Upon the Deep, and for his 1993 essay "The Technological Singularity". In it, he argues that exponential growth in technology will reach a point beyond which we cannot even speculate about the consequences.

Vinge's essay contains the following frequently-quoted statement:

"Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended."

I spent last night digging down into the AI events that led one of the top leaders in the AI sector to write about the need for the government to step in  and help them not screw up. Or maybe cover their asses. More folks are resigning due to the danger while some are just raising a pole of red flags. 

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a warning just yesterday.  Apparently, autonomous agents from a rival company hacked a target that they were not assigned to attack. He says:

"Over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up. We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain. Two things have convinced me. 

My first concern is that, since roughly this summer, AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI. This dynamic is called recursive self-improvement, and it is starting to happen across the industry, including at Anthropic, as we and others have described. Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.

My second concern is the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF), in which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand. 

Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet. "

This is not some Sci-Fi guy with a new book coming out. 

And he is not alone.  Musk and a host of others agree with Amodei's plan.

The former richest man Bill Gates says this:

"In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice. The challenge is monumental. Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. How will we use this technology to make the world a fairer place and keep it from widening the divide between rich and poor? 

How will we protect the people who are most vulnerable to the harms caused by artificial intelligence, including those who lose their livelihoods and the sense that they are in control of their future?

Unfortunately, right now we are not preparing for it. I don’t see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era. 

Bernie Sanders has some ideas. 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 — Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) today announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, forthcoming legislation to stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.

The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules. It would also direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world.

“Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said. “The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. 

It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. That’s why I am introducing legislation to immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI and ban the creation of systems that humanity cannot fully control — at home and around the world. The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. 

The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.”

And of course, our POTUS says  “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” Trump posted on social media, later suggesting that those calling for guardrails on the technology had also warned about climate change, which he also called a hoax.

With leadership like that who needs enemies? 

So what would you do if the internet was brought down by some ill advised agents of a well meaning developer of AGI, a foreign adversary, or some rich Bat Man villain?

Do you have cash?

Do you have written bank statements to prove what you own?

Do you have a  solar power supply to run parts of your home?

Do you have walkie talkies for your family? 

Just saying.

 

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On the Ropes

 

Amongst all the events over the last weeks,  the American Pope gets my nod for making it clear that A I is a huge challenge for his flock and most of the rest of us.  As you may remember, the previous Pope made a strong statement about Climate Change.  And now Pope Leo has issued his encyclible on Artificial General intelligence.

This from the Vatican:

"Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

The opening words of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, summarize its underlying reasons and purpose.

 Pope Leo XIV has taken up the legacy of his predecessor, writing a social encyclical which addresses one of the principal challenges of the contemporary age: artificial intelligence.

Divided into five chapters, Magnifica humanitas has an underlying premise: technology is not “a force antagonistic to humanity” (4), nor is it “inherently evil” (9). However, “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.

Therefore, Pope Leo XIV appeals for people to build “for the common good” and to “remain human,” following a courageous mentality of shared responsibility and communion, so that the world “will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell”

In the meantime, The Times reports:

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company behind the chatbot Claude, confidentially filed on Monday for an initial public offering, joining what could be a once-in-a-generation, moneymaking moment on Wall Street.

With its I.P.O. filing, Anthropic is expected to be among three high-profile companies preparing to go public this year, along with the rocket company SpaceX and OpenAI, which started the A.I. boom in 2022 with its ChatGPT chatbot.

Their I.P.O.s, which would be among the biggest ever, could create a tsunami of investment and employee wealth, and mint the world’s first trillionaire in Elon Musk, who owns about 50 percent of SpaceX. 

The public offerings could also flood the nonprofit world with new money, since Anthropic and OpenAI have both pledged a large part of their shares to charity. 

SpaceX’s I.P.O. is expected this month, and OpenAI has been preparing to file in the coming weeks.

And then the other night, the biggest explosion I've seen maybe since Mount Helena, blew parts of Cape Canaveral to Kingdom Come in a so called anomaly.  (Not an unscheduled rapid disassembly)

Blue Origin experienced a fiery setback Thursday when its New Glenn rocket exploded on the launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla. 

“I have very little doubt that Blue Origin will get to the bottom of this,” said Stan Shull, the founder of Seattle-based space technology consulting firm Alliance Velocity. “They seem very vision and goal driven, and I don’t expect this to change that, but it’s a setback, and it’s a significant one. 

“It’s going to change the timeline of their hopes and dreams.” 

Blue Origin’s rocket exploded during what’s known as a static fire test, a typical test run before launch to ensure the rocket’s systems are working as expected. Shull described it as filling the rocket with propellant, then briefly firing up the engines. 

On Thursday, “right around the time of ignition, the whole thing just blew up in a very spectacular way,” Shull said. “I don’t recall ever seeing one like this before.”

And the damage to the surrounding area is extensive as Blue Origin is warning residents and visitors that debris from the recent rocket explosion could begin washing ashore along Brevard County beaches in the coming days and weeks, prompting safety concerns for beachgoers and environmental advocates. 

So science and rockets and computers are certainly in the news.

But what's not in the news, according to Google AI, is the damage inflicted by Iranian forces on our bases. It is substantially higher than reported:

Yes, damage to U.S. bases in the Middle East is significantly higher than initially acknowledged by the U.S. government. Investigations and analyses—including an extensive review of satellite imagery by the Washington Post and reporting by the BBC—reveal a much broader scope of destruction. 

Asset Destruction: At least 228 structures and pieces of major equipment have been damaged or destroyed across 15 U.S. military sites in the Middle East. [1, 2]

Critical Systems Hit: The strikes heavily impacted key military assets, including destroying multiple Patriot and THAAD missile defense systems, satellite communication sites, and an E-3 Sentry command and control aircraft. [1, 2]

Soft Targets: Iranian strikes also successfully targeted "soft targets," including hangars, fuel depots, and living quarters (such as barracks and gyms), specifically to inflict mass casualties. [1, 2]

Strategic Relocation: Due to the severity of the threat, U.S. commanders relocated the vast majority of personnel away from exposed bases to avoid mass casualties, leaving many of these sites lightly staffed. 

And so today, Drumph crashes his own cease-fire agreement like the cheap real estate character he is. He, along with his cracker barrel team he assigned to do the negotiating, are treating a 5,000 year old culture like a newbee on the trading block.  And oil futures go back up,  stocks go up or down, while inventories continue their slide.

And Xi looks real good.

And we look worse and worse.

And Pax Americana is on the Ropes.

 

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From a Firehose

 

 

If you feel like you've been drinking from a firehose, join the club.  

Just this month alone, the US is now bragging about bombing a 5000 year old civilization back to the stone age, and in so doing has caused the almost closure of the Strait of Hormuz, rocking energy prices and fertilizer shipments to the West.  Eight million or so have demonstrated in the NO Kings protest against the most corrupt, vile, undemocratic administration in the 250 year history of our Republic. It just goes on and on.

But last night, we  saw the AI Doc.

This from Wikipedia:

"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is a 2026 American documentary film directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell. It is produced by the Academy Award–winning teams behind Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Jonathan Wang) and Navalny (Shane Boris and Diane Becker)."

So this is no fly by night outfit. And despite the firehose of gluttony and ignorance we see in our daily political existence, this movie might very be the scariest movie you'll see this year.  (or any year)

This from KQED, 

"Roher gathers the interviewees into three broad groups: the terrifyingly pessimistic ones, the naively optimistic ones and the CEOs who are casually working on something that may or may not spark humanity’s demise. (Well, three out of five of them, anyway: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei all appear. Mark Zuckerberg declined to participate and Elon Musk apparently backed out at the last minute.)

The worst AI predictions are presented first. Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, calmly talks of the “abrupt extermination” of humanity. Author and historian Yuval Noah Harari calls AI “a deadly threat.”

Center for Humane Technology President Tristan Harris — one of the most measured commentators in the movie — also shares some truly sobering views, the worst of which is that he knows active AI researchers who “don’t expect their children to make it to high school.” It doesn’t help matters that machine learning researcher Shane Legg follows this with the assertion, “The really powerful systems are coming and they’re coming soon. (clip)

In his conversations with Roher, Sam Altman talks a good game about the safety protocols that OpenAI has in place. Given his company’s highly controversial new contract with the Department of Defense, his words will either ring hollow or serve as comfort, depending on your viewpoint. For his part in The AI Doc, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei simply says, “Am I confident that everything’s going to work out? No, I’m not.” Hassabis is even more vague: “If something is possible to do, humanity is going to do it,” he says.

The feeling I left The AI Doc with is that the future of AI is overwhelmingly — and unfortunately — out of the hands of everyday people. "

That's just not just scary,  that's undemocratic.   

After the movie, we went down to our favorite italian restaurant and bar on the corner.  There we ordered our usual meal of Kale Salad and Meatballs on Polenta.  We were still  working on digesting the movie when the food arrived.   Next to us at the corner of the bar were two 40ish males  One of them was in High Tech and the other was in Property Management.  The conversation went on long enough for me get a couple of doubles in.  But they were moved by the movie.  My partner was moved.  And my hair went from being on fire to whatever the plasma version of that is. 

I told my story about how I have spent most of my adult years (after my Armadillo daze) working in Renewables trying to deal with the existential challenge that humanity faces with Climate Change.  How I built the first commercial wind farm in Texas, how I served as Chairman of the Electric Utility to adopt renewable energy goals that far exceeded the tepid goals of most organizations, how I lobbied the PUC for an energy only payment protocol ultimately creating an economic environment such that rosy red Texas has more Wind, more Solar, and more Storage than any other state.  And even with the R's trying to stop the train, the tracks are laid.

I didn't mention that I had been blogging about it for 22 years now. 

But I did tell them that I no longer think that Climate Change is  the primary existential challenge of humankind.  Oh it is, but it's like a meteor that  is way out in deep space but clearly heading our way.  The AI meteor is in our solar system.  And there are billions and billions of dollars and other currencies being spent right now as the race for  artificial general intelligence (AGI) dominance goes into overdrive.

According to  Google AI, 

As of early 2026, true AGI does not exist. Current research focuses on improving large language models (LLMs) to handle more generalized reasoning, though they still fail at complex, novel tasks that humans easily solve. It also says,  Development of AGI brings significant risks, including ethical issues regarding AI safety, job displacement, and alignment with human values.

Global investment in artificial intelligence is currently witnessing an unprecedented surge, with projections indicating that it will reach roughly

$1.5 trillion in 2025 and exceed $2 trillion in 2026. This massive influx of capital is driven by a global race to build AI infrastructure, specifically data centers and hardware, with total annual investment expected to grow by over 40% annually.

 

Global military expenditures reached a record high of approximately $2.7 trillion in 2024.

At 40% annual growth, AI investments will eclipse our war investments by next year.

We cannot drink from the Firehose.

We must point our efforts elsewhere. 

My brother Frank would say: 

You can't worry about your Dandriff,

When you are dying of Cancer.

Something else got him. 

 

 

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Where the Future Is

 

Most of my immediate family goes to Idaho to ski about this time of year leaving me at home to piddle around and stay up late reading or writing early into the morning.  My current mind challenge is trying to get my hands around the spectacular growth in Artificial Intelligence in the last  year and the resource and political  implications of it all. 

But last night, I was watching (actually binging) a new civil war series called the Gray House.  At around 3:00 having had enough of the spymaster story of the Confederate White House apparently named Gray House, I did my oral care and hopped into my solitary, super comfy bed.  Often, when I sleep alone, I like to leave NPR on as company and as an aural filler.  I lit the essential oil candle and turned off the bed lights behind the headboard, laid my head down, and then heard something about Drumph having just made a statement on his Truth Social account that he and Bebe just bombed Iran. 

I jumped up, flipped open my mini, and watched my normal center left news networks and yup, right there from Mar a Lago, was the POTUS in a white USA baseball cap telling the Iranians and the rest of the world that he is giving them a chance to be free; but for now to stay in doors because there is going to be a lot of bombs out there. 

And now, that's all there is on our media and will be for a while.  Most of the actual pictures come from Al Jazzerra right now.  The Fairmount in Dubai got whacked by a drone, and the Navy took some shots on their 5th fleet.  But we got our man, or at least the Israeli Air Force did.  And Khamenei, their supreme leader is now officially a martyr. We apparently also got a school full of young girls.

And now the Revolutionary Guards are warning of an intense offensive to come.

In the meantime, the Pentagon is trying to force the creators of Claude to allow their AI to not be restricted by their terms of service regarding AI homicide.  The Justice Department excluded FBI reports that Drumph forced a teenager's head onto his mushroom which she bit, and then he socks her with his fist. And we can't forget that the EPA just rescinded the endangerment finding regarding CO2 and its regulatory foundation for climate change policy.

All of this while the warnings regarding AI go unheeded:

Industry warnings regarding AI have escalated significantly as of February 2026, ranging from immediate economic disruption to long-term existential threats. High-profile executives and researchers from

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have reached a consensus that AI risks should be treated with the same urgency as pandemics or nuclear war.

Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei,  warned in May 2025 that AI could eliminate up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, potentially spiking unemployment to 10–20% within five years.

In late February 2026, Jack Dorsey’s Block announced plans to cut over 4,000 jobs—nearly half its staff—citing AI-driven productivity gains.

 Financial institutions like Citigroup have cautioned that AI implementation may lead to higher unemployment and deflation. Some analysts warn of a "vibe coding" shift that could render traditional software roles obsolete.    

 This from Wikipedia:

Experts disagree on whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) can achieve the capabilities needed for human extinction. Debates center on AGI's technical feasibility, the speed of self-improvement,^[7] and the effectiveness of alignment strategies.^[8] 

Concerns about superintelligence have been voiced by researchers including Geoffrey Hinton,^[9] Yoshua Bengio,^[10] Demis Hassabis,^[11] and Alan Turing,^[a] and AI company CEOs such as Dario Amodei (Anthropic),^[14] Sam Altman (OpenAI),^[15] and Elon Musk (xAI).^[16] 

 In 2022, a survey of AI researchers with a 17% response rate found that the majority believed there is a 10 percent or greater chance that human inability to control AI will cause an existential catastrophe.^[17][18] 

In 2023, hundreds of AI experts and other notable figures signed a statement declaring, "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war".^[19] 

Following increased concern over AI risks, government leaders such as United Kingdom prime minister Rishi Sunak^[20] and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres^[21] called for an increased focus on global AI regulation.  

Researchers warn that an "intelligence explosion"—a rapid, recursive cycle of AI self-improvement—could outpace human oversight and infrastructure, leaving no opportunity to implement safety measures. In this scenario, an AI more intelligent than its creators would recursively improve itself at an exponentially increasing rate, too quickly for its handlers or society at large to control.

Something tells me that Drumph and his DoW boy wonder have a plan for Iran.  And it probably came from Claude. ( or one of his brothers)

And sooner than you think, our boots on the ground may not be leather.

I told my grandson that all my life I've wondered where the future is.

And now it's here. 

And it's just like the movies. 

 

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It Happened Here

One of my favorite expressions when I want to describe a situation that is really creepy or haunting in a very real sense is to say that the moment feels like the beginning of a Stephen King movie. (And I generally don't like or even watch his movies or read his books.) You know what I'm saying though. The scene might seem somewhat normal to some but to the trained eye, it's the beginning of something really horrible.  

Well, in fact we in the US and in the World are living such a movie.

It's the Dead Zone. 

The theory that Stephen King's 1979 novel

The Dead Zone predicted the rise of Donald Trump centers on the book's populist politician character, Greg Stillson. The comparison is based on Stillson's manipulative personality, his "outsider" appeal, and the way he uses public perception to gain power.  

Who is Greg Stillson?

 

In The Dead Zone, Stillson is a political candidate who presents himself as a man of the people, wearing a hard hat to appeal to blue-collar workers. Behind the scenes, he is a ruthless, corrupt, and murderous psychopath. 

  

Those who see similarities between the fictional Stillson and Drumph point to the following characteristics: 

• The outsider persona: Stillson, like Drumph, positions himself as an unconventional politician who is "outside the mainstream" and willing to say anything to captivate voters.
• Populist appeal: Both characters tap into public frustration by pandering to the "everyman" with promises to fix a corrupt system.
• Manipulation of the media: The novel questions the power of journalism to hold such figures accountable, a theme that has been heavily discussed in the context of Drumph's rise.
• The infamous photo: In the book, a photographer captures a damning image of Stillson using a baby as a human shield, which destroys his political career. However, some observers note that a similar photograph of a real-life public figure might not have the same effect in the current, highly polarized media landscape.  

Where is the photo or image that will bring Drumph down? Is it his many pictures with the serial molester of children and best friend Epstein?  Or his picture with the Porn Star he paid before the 2016 election?  No, the picture that probably elected him in 2024, was his blooded face rising with his clenched fist below a giant flag hoisted by a crane quickly orchestrated and produced by an opportunistic campaign flack.

  

Novelists have long imagined, and warned of, the threat to liberal places from totalitarian rule. British writers of the 20th century, including George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Robert Harris, won mass audiences for their depictions of anti-democratic dystopias. 

 

All owed a debt, in turn, to a disillusioned Russian revolutionary, Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose novel “We” described a dictatorial “OneState” of the 26th century, in which humans become mere “Numbers”—automatons who prioritise efficiency over freedom. 

 

His book, published in the early 1920s, provided an inspiration for Orwell’s “1984”. Authors across the Atlantic have fretted no less than Europeans about threats to democracy. Margaret Atwood, a Canadian, imagined America becoming a repressive religious republic, Gilead. 

 

Sinclair Lewis, who wrote soon after the Nazis were elected to power in Germany, told a story of the rise of populist, fascist government and the failures of ordinary American citizens to resist it. His book "It can't happen here" could now be renamed it happened here. 

 

Now, except for the those house media sources that are part of the ruling junta, the administration is now called a regime.

 

The question is moving quickly from one of condition to one of what can be done.

 

This from the Globe and Mail:

 

To call what is happening a “slide” into authoritarianism, as if it were something anarchic and uncontrolled, would not be apt. It is more like a cementing. Having slipped back into power by the narrowest of margins, Mr. Trump and his acolytes have been steadily expanding from that beachhead, each new power serving as the means to acquire still more.  

  

Often these powers have been acquired illegally, in brazen defiance of the Constitution. But so long as no one holds them to account for it, and so long as the administration refuses to be held to account, they become ratified by convention, or practice, or sheer nerve, the de facto rapidly congealing into the de jure.

At some point, American democracy will find it is caught, immovably, a colossus in quicksand. 

The examples pile up by the day. In recent days, weeks and months, Mr. Trump and his officials have:

• Installed National Guard troops and other military forces in the centre of major American cities, first Los Angeles, then Washington, and soon (if Mr. Trump’s threats are to be believed) Chicago, Baltimore and New York. 
• Seized thousands of suspected illegal immigrants off the streets, the snatchings carried out by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents without badges, their victims bundled into cars without markings, to be sent in some cases to barbaric foreign prison camps, in some cases to their domestic counterparts, without trial, without even charges. ICE is increasingly seen as Mr. Trump’s personal police force.
• Initiated criminal investigations into various of Mr. Trump’s antagonists, from Letitia James, the Attorney-General of New York who prosecuted him for fraud, to Jack Smith, the special counsel who prosecuted him for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election and for his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, to John Bolton, his own former national security adviser who has since become one of his severest critics, to Adam Schiff, the Democratic Senator and lead manager on his first impeachment. more

 

It has happened here.

 

Chicago is responding,  

 

California and New York are crafting their own executive orders,

 

the Appeals Court finds his tariffs illegal,

 

And it's time for Americans to begin talking about a Soft Secession. 

 

And it's time for the Plutocrats to  step off the train.

 

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King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war

 

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

tus quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They wanted

tus quo and sick of it. Voters saw a vast and overloaded apple cart lumbering past them. They want

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war thr

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war three.”

King’s most presciently crafted Trump-like character appears in his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. “Greg Stillson is a door-to-door Bible salesman with a gift of gab, a ready wit and the common touch. He is laughed at when he runs for mayor in his small New England town, but he wins,” a sequence of events that repeats itself when he runs for the House of Representatives and then for the presidency — a rise foreseen by the story’s hero Johnny Smith, granted clairvoyant powers by a car wreck. “He realizes that some day Stillson is going to laugh and joke his way into the White House, where he will start world war th

 

Fusion Confusion

 

Who didn't hear or read about the big fusion development this December when scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Dec 5th that they had crossed a long-awaited milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory?

It made the news for several days and lots of news outlets gave the breakthrough the legs that would turn most PR flacks green with envy.  

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C."

"If fusion can be deployed on a large scale, it would offer an energy source devoid of the pollution and greenhouse gases caused by the burning of fossil fuels and the dangerous long-lived radioactive waste created by current nuclear power plants, which use the splitting of uranium to produce energy."

Well actually, fusion is deployed on a large scale right now and it's called the Sun.

And the energy from our own fusion reactor 93 million miles away arrives everyday bathing the planet with enough energy so that Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize winning idea that photons can excite a crystal latticework and produce usable electrons that can power our world.

And solar plants are going up all over the World right now producing electricity that is affordable and reliable.  Last year photovoltaic plants produced 112 gigawatts of usable power in the United States. And with wind and its other renewable cousins, renewables produce about 20% of all power. Here in Texas, that number is closer to 1/3. And that number is growing like a Chia pet.

And moving to a world run on our own fusion reactor a safe 8 minutes away at light speed is not just here, it's being manifested at prodigious speed across the resource rich landscapes of our land.

But according to the NYTs and other corporate soothsayers, the fusion of the future is not 93 miles away but right here on earth.

"Within the sun and stars, fusion continually combines hydrogen atoms into helium, producing sunlight and warmth that bathes the planets. In experimental reactors and laser labs on Earth, fusion lives up to its reputation as a very clean energy source.

There was always a nagging caveat, however. In all of the efforts by scientists to control the unruly power of fusion, their experiments consumed more energy than the fusion reactions generated.

That changed at 1:03 a.m. on Dec. 5 when 192 giant lasers at the laboratory’s National Ignition Facility blasted a small cylinder about the size of a pencil eraser that contained a frozen nubbin of hydrogen encased in diamond.

The laser beams entered at the top and bottom of the cylinder, vaporizing it. That generated an inward onslaught of X-rays that compresses a BB-size fuel pellet of deuterium and tritium, the heavier forms of hydrogen.

In a brief moment lasting less than 100 trillionths of a second, 2.05 megajoules of energy — roughly the equivalent of a pound of TNT — bombarded the hydrogen pellet. Out flowed a flood of neutron particles — the product of fusion — which carried about 3 megajoules of energy, a factor of 1.5 in energy gain."

Now if you are writing this story, you can use a big bangy metaphor like a pound of TNT, but if you just look it up, you'll see that 1 megajoule is 0.277KWh.  So, the gain is about a quarter of a KWh or about 3 cents worth of energy.  And that's not counting all the other parasitic costs and expense of building a  power plant that can house a Sun on Earth.

The New York Times goes on:

"The main purpose of the National Ignition Facility is to conduct experiments to help the United States maintain its nuclear weapons. That makes the immediate implications for producing energy tentative.

Fusion would be essentially an emissions-free source of power, and it would help reduce the need for power plants burning coal and natural gas, which pump billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

But it will take quite a while before fusion becomes available on a widespread, practical scale, if ever.

“Probably decades,” Kimberly S. Budil, the director of Lawrence Livermore, said during the Tuesday news conference. “Not six decades, I don’t think. I think not five decades, which is what we used to say. I think it’s moving into the foreground and probably, with concerted effort and investment, a few decades of research on the underlying technologies could put us in a position to build a power plant.”

In two decades, climate temperatures will exceed the 1.5 Degree Celsius rise that most climate scientists hope we can survive.  And, spending money on Fusion will not put a dent in our ability to reduce our carbon emissions.  

This program is a war program.

Lots of fusion confusion.

 

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