shawn ritchie dot com

Fund Fusion, Fuckheads

EU, Others Arguing Like Bitches Over Funding Fusion Reactor; Amounts Involved Wouldn't Get BP Out of Bed In the Morning

As much as none of us seem to really want to admit it, we HAVE HAVE HAVE to get away from using fossil fuels as soon as possible. Think about it: we can't grow more gas or oil, yet our demand for it is rising annually in a manner that would give Malthus himself a case of the Terror Runs. When China and India finish industrializing, assuming the planet doesn't crack open like a rotten egg from the sheer effort of trying to support that, we'll be able to measure our remaining supply of fossil fuels with a single digit count of decades. 

I know every smug-fuck Prius driver thinks they're personally saving the planet with their brave decision to drive a shitty car and annoy the rest of us who have real engines and want to get where we need to be with alacrity, but all the hybrid and/or electric cars in the world are barely gonna buy us an extra month of civilization once the Third World decides it wants our standard of living across the board.

What WILL save us is going to be something involving fusion. When every building on the planet has its own off-grid power source tucked into the basement, THAT'S when we can get all utopian up in this shit and also realize we have enough dino juice left over to power our awesome V8s all we want. 

Yet... research into this is resisted. In reading the article above, the key thing that jumps out at me is that a) due to the currently uncertain nature of the research and where it has to head, the cost estimate keeps rising and b) that cost estimate is currently $21 billion US.

Yeah... that's a big fat chunk of change.

HOWEVER...

Everybody right now is pouring money into trying to extract every last drop of fossil fuel from the planet, no matter how difficult or expensive it is to do so or the brutal fuckups (see: the Gulf) that occur in doing so. Even with that, one year of BP's profits cover over 60% of that cost to research fusion on a large scale. And BP's just one of many oil companies making mad-assed scratch at tying us down to this fuel source THAT WILL ABSOLUTELY ONE DAY RUN OUT AND BE GONE FOREVER.

What's to stop the governments of the world from, for once, taking the long view, and telling all oil companies everywhere that, hey, fuck you, the gravy train is getting halved. Fifty cents US of every dollar US profit you make is being taken away from you and directed straight to the most plausible research in fuels to replace your planet-wrecking asses. Sorry, you'll ONLY make SEVEN BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS next year. But, hey, look on the bright side: your great-grandkids will have heat.

We need a global Manhattan Project to find a new fuel, renewable fuel source that works. Fusion is currently the most likely candidate for that. Why we haven't been shoveling money at this for a decade already is beyond me. Why we're currently quibbling over money amounts that are, at government-spending levels, barely worth batting an eye it is completely infuriating.

Instead, I'm pretty sure we'll continue to pour every dollar possible down the rabbit hole of continued and absolute reliance on fossil fuels, regardless of the wars, death, ecological destruction, visceral hatred of the United States by every brown person everywhere...

...and then one day, we'll wake, the last drop of oil will be gone, and we'll all mutter "fuuuuuuuuuuuuck" while our way of live grinds to a complete halt and the world returns to being lit only by fire.

We're a bunch of assholes who deserve to die.

 

Dear People of Power: Slow the Fuck Down

The Right-Wing Media vs. Shirley Sherrod fiasco reflects poorly on everyone involved save Ms Sherrod herself, who has handled this with more grace and aplomb than most of us would ever be able to muster.

Anybody who's followed Andrew Breitbart's career at all isn't surprised one iota that that arrogant, celebrity-lusting shithead has managed to lie and manufacture his way back into the greasy limelight, if even for just a day or two. Nor should anybody be surprised that FOX News decided to back this story to the hilt until the entire right-wing blather machine had the needle pegged at "hysterical". 

What _did_ surprise me was how quickly the Sect. of Agriculture, and, by extension, the White House, accepted the initial report as 100% truth and moved to destroy Ms Sherrod with an alacrity one wishes they would use for other, real crisises, such as, say, getting the fuck out of Afghanistan or Iraq, kicking BP in the junk, pushing through real finance reform instead of kowtowing to the Republicans and spending more time watering it down than fighting for what is actually needed... I think you get my drift.

I'm surprised because, as soon as the words "Breitbart", "biggovernment.com", etc., showed up as being the originators of the story, no one in power had the presence of mind to go "Oh. Those are the shitheads that faked up the whole ACORN non-story. Fuck them and ignore this new pack of lies entirely, everybody". Instead, they harassed the person who ended up, of course, being the victim of this entire mess into resigning immediately.

Sure, the Powers That Be have gone a long way towards reversing their idiot decisions made in the immediate wake of this turd of a story splashing into the media toilet bowl, but they best be taking a long, hard look at how they reacted in the first place. Firing someone isn't a decision that should be made in a few hours with no investigation or even, apparently, after hearing the accused's side of the story. 

And, if the accuser is some hateful, self-promoting blowhardy piece of jagoff named Andrew Breitbart, they'd be better off just ignoring it entirely, for it's 100% likely to be spin-job horseshit absolutely designed to a) make the incumbent powers, being Democrats, look bad and b) be, essentially, lies.

Book Review: Directive 51 by John Barnes

My favorite fiction is of the type where the plot can be summed up as "Everything goes to shit. Then it gets worse". John Barnes is a master of this particularly dystopian genre. So, when I heard he had a new novel coming out that would kick off a fresh trilogy, I was very excited.

Having actually read the book, I am still very excited for the next entry in the series, but I'm also a bit confused.

Barnes is probably best known for his two previous series; the near-future "Meme Wars" cycle and its distant, loosely-linked sequel, "The Thousand Cultures". The former tells the tale of an Earth where the KGB goes capitalist and spends a few decades killing anybody smart and competent to make sure all worthwhile inventions stay theirs, against a background of wars nuclear and biological. Oh, and the complete collapse of the environment happens, too. The latter series covers a humanity spread across the stars, each planet living a false version of some weird version of Earth's history, whilst the mother planet is host to billions of people who literally never leave their VR boxes. Oh, and World War IV ended with various large swaths of the planet, such as Japan, Central America and Paris, turned into glass thanks to fusion bombs. 

Fun times, eh?

And yet, in Directive 51, Barnes outdoes himself with the Bad Happenings. It's not ruining the plot to tell you that virii capable of destroying everything made of rubber or plastic are released worldwide, and prove to be quite effective. Then, unknown enemies manage to start nibbling away at what's left of the United States via bombs that make the one that erased Hiroshima look like a firecracker.

It's very, very grim. 

The story itself centers around disparate groups of people, mostly variants of American good guys with a smattering of bad and a nice handful of "not sure which side they're on" and how they react to the ongoing catastrophes. Set in the near-ish future, the obvious heroes are some members of the US Dept. of the Future, a not-as-dumb-as-it-sounds department created around our time and tasked with doing its best to predict scenarios and reaction plans for those happenings that the government can then quickly act upon as needed. Sort of a Homeland Security in that it coordinates other, existing departments for the most part, but in this sense as a predictive unit, not a reactive one. 

Setting the characters in such a department allows Barnes to take some side trips into explaining his real-life day job as a semiotician (look it up or read the book, I ain't even trying to explain it here). He's done this before, particularly in his short stories and essays collection, Apocalypses & Apostrophes, and I always enjoy the digressions.

The action is rollicking, the characters are appropriately either likable or not depending (with a bit too much black and white separation in some of them), the drama and suspense almost unbearable... the plot twists and turns and throws curveballs with regularity, making it a terrible choice to start reading late on a work night. 

My complaints are few, but real: for one, given the level of absolute "holy shit, the world as we know it is FUCKED and, honestly, 9 out of 10 people alive today are going to not be in a year" that is the background for the novel, there's a distinct lack of people freaking out. There's a whole lot of rolling with the punches, some regrets, but a distinct lack of the suicidal checking out I would expect in this scenario. It's discordant at times to realize how people are acting in the midst of what might end up being an extinction event for our entire species. 

Secondly, some of the plot twists are overused. Not one but two presidential succession emergencies arise, which, given that Directive 51 is an actual US government document covering such an event and therefore very relevant to the book, struck me as a bit "really? Again?", particularly since some key characters seem to have had their personalities stretched in unnatural ways to fit the second crisis. The sheer ongoing repetition of catastrophic events, some of which just on their own would probably ruin all modern society, gets to the point of numbing as well; when billions have already croaked, it's hard to care about a few hundred thousand more (although what Barnes does to my hometown did bring a lump to my throat).

That said, the book is very enjoyable page-turner for those of us who prefer to think about just how bad things can get rather than slap on a smile and futilely dream about ways to avoid it.