Author: Captain Obvious

I am really concerned that our media have lost their sense of national security and pride in America.  Otherwise, why would a lead article in the Wall Street Journal feature an article like this:  https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/hypersonic-missiles-america-military-behind-936a3128?st=xo5xh0p9ezxqfl7&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

I was trained to neither confirm nor deny anything people said to me about our nuclear submarine program.  I worked on the solution to the loss of the Thresher submarine accident and solved it, developed a bulletproof flow diagram that gave navy operators a roadmap should it happen again, and defended it before Navy leadership.

I was taught that the “need to know” was the first hurdle to even talk to fellow employees at Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, many of whom had higher level security levels than I did.  The adage was “loose lips sink ships” and I lived by it then and still do today.  So, don’t ask me any questions about subs or the Thresher.

What good thing is going to happen when people read this WSJ article?  I can imagine some terrible things as you can.  I have always thought of strength as a deterrent to war.  It sure seems that advertising weaknesses is the opposite.

Plus, I have always considered the WSJ above this kind of reporting.  What good thing do they think is going to happen with their readership?  Or, are they looking to our enemies for subscriptions to their publications as a result?

It sure seems like irresponsible reporting to me.

You all have heard me tell the story of the Catholic priest and rabbi who accidentally sat at lunch during a large ecumenical conference. At one point in their conversation, the priest asked the rabbi about the Jewish dietary laws, and then asked specifically whether he had ever eaten a ham and cheese sandwich … which violates two laws: eating pork and eating meat with dairy at the same meal. The rabbi kind of cowered a bit but nodded that he had.

Feeling a bit justified to return the question he asked the priest about the celibacy requirements of priesthood and then specifically whether he had broken that. As the priest cowered in embarrassment the rabbi tried to soften the mood by saying: “well it sure beats a ham and cheese sandwich!”

A recent Wall Street Journal provides one more reason to avoid pork but does so by shifting the meaning that most of us know in politics. Here is the link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chuck-schumer-artificial-intelligence-subsidies-todd-young-mike-rounds-china-d2768c8f?st=6qpk02vots2r79v&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Here is the definition of that kind of pork from Wikipedia:
Pork barrel, or simply pork, is a metaphor for the appropriation of government spending for localized projects secured solely or primarily to direct spending to a representative’s district. Typically, “pork” involves national funding for government programs whose economic or service benefits are concentrated in a particular area but whose costs are spread among all taxpayers. Public works projects, certain national defense spending projects, and agricultural subsidies are the most commonly cited examples.

This kind of pork should be shunned by all of us. It is wasteful, deceitful, and irresponsible. Yet, we all know it is happening. Every time we hear of some noble cause and a politician asking for money to pay for it, sceptics immediately search for and find huge amounts of pork behind the veneer of good intents.

We also know how it got there … whenever someone comes up with a great program idea, their opponents use this to pad it with pork in exchange for their votes.

Seems all of us paying for their sinful ways should be banning pork … right? Nope. We are all so lazy we fail to search for it and then we shrug our shoulders and admit it kind of tastes good. That reminds me of our church’s event called Pastor’s Pancakes where our Sunday School class served pancakes and bacon to over 600 that morning.

As we were winding down together after the event and having cleaned everything up, a class member who knew I was Jewish asked me whether serving bacon to everyone had made me uncomfortable. I thought for a second and responded: “Not half as much as not charging for it!”

Did you know that in 1890, some 90% of U.S. bread was made in homes and just 10% in small urban bakeries? The bread slicer had just been invented and taken the nation by storm, and human achievements since then have been compared to it by saying: “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

A lot has changed since then.  Bakery behemoths today that make up the $14 billion bread industry operate at a pace and scale that would have been inconceivable a century ago.  They use large, high-speed factories capable of churning out at least 150 loaves or 800 hamburger or hot-dog buns a minute. Ingredients like flour and oil are piped from silos into giant jacuzzi-sized mixers, where thousands of pounds of dough can be mixed before being divided, shaped, and ferried along snaking conveyor belts into ovens, cooling towers and bagging machines.

But this rough and high-speed journey tears apart a dough’s protein matrix, the weblike structure that traps air bubbles and enables dough to rise. When you let dough collapse as bread pans bounce on their race toward ovens, or sit idle for long periods, the result is a dense, flat loaf.  To prevent this, many industrial bread makers add emulsifiers, dough conditioners and other ingredients that help dough withstand the modern manufacturing process. But now all these enhancers are coming under scrutiny for health reasons.

Once you dig into any of these challenges you find we are all faced with tradeoffs.  Yes, we can “clean up” some formulations and sometimes even improve the product.  But often, something else gets sacrificed.  For bread, the most common side effect is reduced shelf life.

Many of you have probably experienced this when you bought that “designer artisanal loaf” only to find three days later you had a science experiment growing on it.  How often have you noticed the tastes of some of your snack foods have changed and when you compare the labels you see ingredients that used to make it taste great are gone.

Perhaps you remember my conversation with a Pepperidge Farm plant manager where they made those wonderful Goldfish crackers and I found they had changed the frying oil from one that tended to make us fat to one that was a carcinogen.

How do we define “best” today?  How do we know something is better than something else?  Shouldn’t we be teaching children to consider life’s choices this way?

Plastic bags for groceries might seem wasteful compared to carrying those sacks you now see, but in fact it takes a lot more energy to make that cloth sack even if you threw that plastic bag away when you got your groceries home.  We reuse those plastic sacks a lot.

What is the best thing anymore?  Perhaps we really don’t even know and should admit that.

Do you remember when fake fur was popular because Americans were repulsed by the disclosure of how minks and other furry animals were being exploited? Marketers came up with a better sounding name: faux fur. The marketing cleverness here was they disguised the idea of fake which normally implies wrong.

When the process of mining diamonds was exposed, we also saw a rapid response when the diamond industry tried to manage the human exploitation … by guaranteeing their diamonds could be traced to responsible miners. The assumption was that the diamond industry could trace individual stones, which they can’t.

It is fascinating to see how quickly artificial diamonds are catching on for the same reasons. Here is an answer to my question whether people are buying fakes because they want to avoid exploitation:

“Yes, synthetic diamonds, also known as lab-grown diamonds, are popular because they are marketed as an ethical alternative to blood diamonds. Lab-grown diamonds are produced in controlled environments, avoiding unethical practices that may be associated with mined diamonds. Mined diamonds may come from areas affected by war crimes, human trafficking, or genocide. Lab-grown diamonds are also sold straight to the consumer or jeweler, without middlemen, which also helps ensure the diamonds are conflict-free.”

So, we seem poised to substitute fakes for what we were once told were precious attributs. Remember the tag line: diamonds are forever? Plus, we were also told that they were precious because they were so expensive to mine and flawless natural ones were truly rare. Perfection was graded. Now we are making perfect fake diamonds but positioning them as superior because we can know for sure no human exploitation was involved.

The diamond industry is built on a fabrication of implications. We bought them when we got married, and the size of the stone became a proxy for how well off the groom was … or in cruel shaming situations, how much the groom loved the bride. I still remember a commercial for diamonds suggesting that I should spend at least as much as I did for my stereo. Funny looking back on it now. A cubic zirconium looks every bit as good.

So, here we are. Fake diamonds are being preferred by an ever-growing portion of our population. What does that say about our value system? This does seem to align with organic vegetables being preferred by many. And, in a strange way, this aligns with our rejection of green carbon credits that are associated with questionable metrics.

The central idea that seems to be emerging is that we want assurances that our purchases are good for us, our communities, and the world at large. That is a hopeful sign.

But, once again, the climate gestapo steps in because they will criticize lab diamond growers because they use about 3 times the energy compared to real diamonds. But, wait a minute, lab grown diamonds only require 250 – 750 kilowatt hours (kWh) to produce a rough carat. Even at $0.20 per kWh, that is at most $150 per stone. Fortunately, lab diamond companies are answering the call by reducing energy consumption and more renewables to make the growing process more energy appealing.

Are we willing in our society to let people choose by only sending price signals, or do we really need to ban this or that to keep people in line? Seems to me that we are afraid of the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith who coined the answer to societal needs as an “invisible hand.” A center finger pointing graphic now seems obvious to me as a visible hand, but that would be politically inappropriate.

Yes, I know you were thinking of the poem by Robert Frost. Sorry to disappoint you, but I am going in another direction, pointing out the road we are on clearly goes nowhere if you are a carbon accounting energy fundamentalist.

This graph clearly shows that the use of fossil fuel in this country is NOT heading down and in fact rising dramatically. How then could we ever believe we will stop adding to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Articles like the one referenced point to the fact that data centers are directly in conflict with environmental goals: https://stateline.org/2024/04/30/states-rethink-data-centers-as-electricity-hogs-strain-the-grid/

It has become increasingly hard to understand how politicians can flipflop so quickly as well: https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2024/04/30/gop-gubernatorial-candidates-promise-coal-boost-utility-regulator-shakeups/

My read on all this is that the seemingly widespread coalition of believers in fossil fuel elimination are rethinking their game books and in the process going to lose their minds.

Also, if you look at the renewables component in the graph above and think about how much energy it took to create those resources, you could easily argue that we would have been better off not making them in the first place. Think about it … producing solar panels and wind turbines requires an enormous amount of energy … which came from fossil fuels in most cases. This is especially true of EVs which have so much embedded carbon that the average driver would never run them long enough to make a positive difference.

Remember, we are buying solar panels and batteries from China, and they are still building coal plants to keep up with their electricity demand. And, just wait till we get to the end of life on all these renewables and must dispose of them because they are not recyclable.

How can the scientific community say they will curb our carbon dioxide release into the atmosphere? The facts are clear as prior blogs indicated that the rate of carbon dioxide release is increasing … e.g., things are getting worse if you believe carbon dioxide is the key measure for planet wellness.

Nobody seems to recognize that demand for goods and services must be curbed, and this means you don’t just let free markets push consumption up in response to the insatiable appetite for profits. You don’t just sit by with ideas like cryptocurrency that gobble energy insatiably in their digital value chain.

I don’t like central planning “socialist” models, but I do believe we must consider their ideas to some extent. The “planetary load” of society has reached a tipping point … we can’t keep going on the current road. We must take a deep breath, pull over, study the maps illustrating our potential paths, and chart a new course.

The road we are on leads nowhere good. We clearly must change course.