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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-05
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
Related:
Iran has a 'shockingly strong' war-crimes case against Trump over Soleimani's killing — and it could win – Business Insider
Trump recounts minute-by-minute details of Soleimani strike to donors at Mar-a-Lago – CNN
>In his speech — held inside the gilded ballroom on his Mar-a-Lago property — he claimed that Soleimani was "saying bad things about our country" before the strike, which led to his decision to authorize his killing.
"How much of this shit do we have to listen to?" Trump asked. "How much are we going to listen to?"<
Other issues:
Self driving cars ain't a thing:
Key Volkswagen Exec Admits Full Self-Driving Cars 'May Never Happen' – The Drive
Reality Check: Tesla, Inc. – Plainsite
>Our fourth Reality Check report: Tesla, Inc. $TSLA. The company's financial disclosures are largely fraudulent and litigation is piling up because CEO Elon Musk is a habitual liar unfit to serve as an officer or director of any publicly traded company.<
737 MAX:
Boeing is working on a new software issue on the 737 Max– ABC News
>Boeing is working to fix a newly discovered problem with software powering up on the 737 Max, adding to the list of tasks the aircraft maker faces to get the grounded plane back in the air.<
Boeing claims that it found the problem itself but the issue comes up in the very same week in which regulators arrived to audit the software.
Use as open thread …
On China’s latest macroeconomic figures:
China GDP grows at slowest pace in 29 years
The Chinese economy advanced 6.0 percent year-on-year in the December quarter of 2019. This was the weakest growth rate since the first quarter of 1992. For 2019 as a whole, the economy grew by 6.1 percent, the slowest pace in 29 years but still within the government’s target of 6 to 6.5 percent.
Manufacturing investment, a gauge on the robustness of the factory sector, fell to 3.1 per cent last year, a record low and a sign that the trade war had taken a toll on China in 2019.
The National Bureau of Statistics noted on Friday morning that China’s economy had “sustained the general momentum” during a difficult period but warned of risks involving “structural, systematic and cyclical problems at home”.
As a saver, China’s industrial production grew 6.9% year-on-year in December, which is the strongest in nine months. Retail sales grew by 8.0%, which was also stronger than expected, while fixed asset investment beat forecasts with 5.4% growth.
Long story short, China has indeed suffered from a major manufacturing slowdown, but nothing catastrophic. Investment fell a lot, but industrial production went up more than twofold said decrease, which indicates there’s no idle capacity problem yet.
Besides, consumption per retail sales grew 8%, and overall non-financial investment grew 5.4%. China is still growing well, and is definitely in a completely different situation than the Western powers (USA, Germany and Japan).
The most impressive of these figures, however, is the context: we’re one decade deep in one of the two most spectacular collapses of capitalism’s history, and even then China continues to grow strongly, without distorting its own system. Isolated, China’s numbers are very far from impressive – the old USSR itself grew much more – but the Chinese are growing 6% at a time the rest of the (capitalist) world is growing 2%, which was never the Soviet case.
In fact, the Chinese are confident:
Commentary: May “China collapse” theories rest in peace
In the link, there’s a very interesting and true analysis:
Sadly, the promising changes taking place in China, if not simply ignored, will likely be misinterpreted as part of China’s ill-motivated ambition under the “China threat” or “China demise” theories — the other side of the “China collapse” doctrine. After all, it is beyond the understanding of some people to properly rate an economy that used to develop at a blistering speed and then steadfastly holds strong amid a slowing global economy.
That’s correct: in the 1990s and 2000s, the Westerners bet on apocalyptic theories about China. Deep down, those “theories” reflected much more what they hoped would happen (“shoulda”) then the objective reality. Now that this “shoulda” didn’t happen, they shifted gears to “China threat” theories, i.e. if China refuses to collapse by itelf, we’ll bring collapse to China (by hot war and economic sanctions).
The imbecilization of the West continues. My prediction is the USA and Western Europe will become fascist in a decade or so.
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Speaking on the imbecilization of the West, there’s this bizarre retrospective on Lenin’s 150th anniversary in the Kommersant:
«Большевик каждую минуту застрелить может» В чем сила ленинского наследия? Исторический экскурс Леонида Млечина
Quoting a bunch of people (both living and dead), TV anchor Leonid Mlechin creates an absurd theory that states the October Revolution only happened because the poor peasants were “envious” of the rich and prosperous peasants (kulaks) and that, had the Reforms of Stolypin time to be implemented, said revolution would’ve never happened.
Mlechin also laments the fact that the October Revolution “destroyed” Russia’s “European sophistication” and “culture”.
It also reproduces the Western narrative that, ultimately, the Bolsheviks only emerged victorious because they simply used more terror and more efficient propaganda than its enemies’, completely erasing WWI and the betrayal of the February Revolution from History. And don’t even talk about the humiliating defeat in the war against Japan in 1905 – that war was definitely thrown in a parallel dimension and simply never happened from the point of view of the empire apologists/saudosists.
Of all the false narratives I’ve read in my life about the Russian Revolution, this is by far the most false and the most absurd. It is even more absurd because it was published essentially at the same time the Russian Government is publishing online its documents about WWII as a tool to fight pro-Polish (pro-capitalist) European propaganda.
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About the “self-driving” cars sheananigans: we called it here first, you read it here first.
Posted by: vk | Jan 19 2020 16:15 utc | 7
Mlechin also laments the fact that the October Revolution “destroyed” Russia’s “European sophistication” and “culture”.
@Posted by: vk | Jan 19 2020 16:15 utc | 7
Well, in case we consider “European sophistication and culture” enjoying an idle life jumping from bed to bed, while spending obscene ammounts of money in European art and jewelery which then they amassed in the Winter Palace to be enjoyed only by the close circle of the Tsarist family and court.
What the October Revolution did was to open this enjoyement to the whole Russian people…
And this is not me who says it, but witnesses at all suspicious of being proletarian “true believers”, as could be Stefan Zweig, who, in his Travel to Russia, testimonies:
“And here, in this chamber of the Hermitage, in this princely palace, more than imperial, in this palace of the tsars, in this city built thanks to unspeakable riches and foolish wonders, that tension is understood, inconceivable to European spirits, which it had to exist between those two worlds separated from each other: the one from above and the one below, the one from absurd and sacrilegious waste and that from the unfathomable poverty and hell of hunger that the peasants knew, With tear in the soul, it is warned this universal contrast between rich and poor, which in these lands reached titanic proportions until motivating that violent and sudden outburst.Only the history of a people is understood, knowing it first hand.There is therefore no more appropriate place to understand the reasons for the Revolution that these treasure chambers and these lavish palaces – the winter one and Tsárkoye Seló – which the Tsars ordered to construct of for themselves … “
The fact that all those treasures and riches could be observed by Stefan Zweig in his travel just after the Revolution, and that we are able to witness them today, is the proof that all that “culture” was preserved not only during the Revolution itself, but also along the atrocious Siege of Leningrad, from the rapacious hands of the Nazis who stole all what of value they could found from the rest of occupied, ransacked, Europe…
In fact, it was precisely Fascism, and its promoters from the other side of the Atlantic, which killed the ancient European culture, an assassination process which is to be culminated in our very days, as envisioned by the same Stefan Zweig, who, feeling that Europe would never come back to be the same, in front of the brutalizing and increasing declining and clearly coming absence of interesting intellectual and cultural life, could not but finish his life, while in his Brazilian exile, at Petrópolis…
His own suicide puts in evidence what at all lights is the goal of these monsters assassins of cultures, as William Blum also clearly delineated, “Killing Hope”…
Posted by: Sasha | Jan 19 2020 19:44 utc | 37
Re karlof1 | Jan 19 2020 22:52 utc | 58
The technical paper you linked to makes it clear that Rosatam is promoting fast neutron, or “breeder” reactors. These reactors can convert uranium 238 into plutonium 239 and will produce more plutonium than they burn, thus “breeding” nuclear fuel. It has always been the wet dream of the nuclear industry to transition to breeder reactors; as the technical paper points out, there is a limited amount of uranium ore that is rich enough in U235 (the fissile element that is concentrated during the enrichment process) to sustain the current forms of nuclear power plants for another century (or less).
But running reactors on U238, that entirely changes the picture. Historically it has been difficult to run a breeder reactor, because many have used liquid sodium as the primary coolant. Sodium has a little problem as it is highly reactive when exposed to air or water and it can explode, which can create problems if you are using plutonium as a fuel.
Of course, producing more plutonium can also have its downsides, since it is used as the fissile trigger in nuclear weapons. Japan has a stockpile of about 45 tons of plutonium that has been reprocessed from spent nuclear fuel. (Reactor grade fuel can be used to create a nuclear weapo.)
More importantly, the RT article is using semantics to make it appear that there will be “No nuclear waste”. Wrong, there will still be large amounts of nuclear waste (although significantly reduced in volume, but still highly radioactive fission products), and there would still be a need to separate the plutonium from the fission products being produced.
Another very disingenous aspect of the pictured “closed” nuclear fuel cycle being promoted by Rosatom is that it ignores the enormous about of “low level” radioactive waste created by uranium mining.
Uranium mining in Canada is projected to create 200 million tons of mine tailings. The huge amount of sand like tailings from uranium milling contain 85 percent of the radioactivity that was present in the original ore. The radioactive materials in uranium mill tailings – isotopes of radium, radon, polonium,and thorium, along with radioactive varieties of bismuth and lead – are all radioactive disintegration byproducts of uranium. Each one of them is far more radiotoxic than uranium – which is itself a dangerous material, being a radioactive heavy metal.
Mining hundreds of millions of tons of uranium ore and bringing it up to the surface, and then dumping the tailings creates a few problems, for example with the radon gas that is released.
So I disagree that there is “No Nuclear Waste” created by breeder reactors. It is just a great sales pitch.
Re c1ue | Jan 19 2020 23:28 utc | 66
“Strictly speaking, nothing that comes out of a nuclear power plant is “unnatural”.
The fission process would occur with or without enrichment – only a lot slower.”
Seriously? You create hundreds of millions of tons of radioactive waste in the mining process, then use huge amounts of energy to “enrich” (concentrate) U235 to LEU so it can be used in fuel rods (yes you can use U238 in some reactor designs like CANDU, but most require 3-5% enrichment from the 0.7% naturally occuring concentration of U235 in uranium ores), and then create hundreds of thousands of tons of high-level nuclear waste . . . and you want to equate this with a “natural” process?
I guess you could say the same thing about a nuclear detonation? That the fission products would occur “naturally” only a lot slower?
The “issue” is how in hell do we isolate this fiendishly toxic stuff from the biosphere for the next 100,000 years? A few grams of cesium137 are enough to make a square mile of land uninhabitable for a century! Want evidence of that? Look at the map the CIA created of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, and check out the key to the map. The exclusion zones and radiation control zones are defined by the amount of cesium137 per square kilometer.
40 (or more) Curies of Cesium137 makes the land uninhabitable (for at least a century or longer). There are 88 Curies per gram of Cesium137, therefore less than half a gram of Cesium137, made into an aerosol and evenly distributed over a square kilometer, makes that land into a radiation exclusion zone. That translates into 1.2 grams per square mile. A US dimes weigh less than 3 grams.
Most US spent fuel pools have close to a ton of Cesium 137 inside the spent fuel rods. Because cesium is the second most volatile element after mercury, it is a liquid at 83 degrees F, and it becomes a gas at 1240 degrees F. In a catastrophic nuclear accident, when fuel rods heat to the point of rupture or ignition, most of the radioactive cesium in the rods has become a gas. This is why radioactive cesium becomes the predominant long-lived radioactive contaminant in the destruction of spent fuel rods in reactor cores (and fuel pools, if one is destroyed).
You ask why long-lived radioactive elements, such as Aluminum, are ok when there are so many of them? Perhaps because Aluminum is not radioactve? lol
I thought you might point to long-lived radioactive elemments, such as Potassium 40 and ask wny they are not a big problem? I would say that amount of radioactivity per unit mass; Potassium 40 has 71 ten millionths of a Curie per gram, whereas Cesium 137 has 88 Curies per gram.
Re Pft | Jan 20 2020 2:08 utc | 77
“Nuclear waste in the US is a problem, no doubt. Thats not due to nuclear power, its due to the insistence that the spent nuclear fuel rods not be recycled out of the bogus fear they would used to make weapons (in someones basement or cave). Some countries like France do recycle the fuel rods and the small amount that is left over imbedded in glass log”
Hanford, Washington, has about 53 million gallons of highly acidic and highly radioactive waste that is a byproduct from reprocessing plutonium for US nuclear weapons (rods were dissolved in nitric acid to remove the polutonium by chemical processes). These 53 million gallons of waste is sitting in underground tanks that are leaking; the site has become the biggest single Superfund cleanup site in the US, and the EPA has been spending a fortune for years, trying to set up a process to make the glass logs you refer to.
Nuclear waste is a problem because it is toxic at the atomic, molecular level. A single atom or molecule of Cs137 inside the body will highly irradiate a tiny cluster of cells that surround it. The radioactive “safety standards” use calculations that average this dose out over large masses of tissue, which acts to disguise the damange being done at the point of exposure.
Fission products like Cesium137 and Strontium90 will persist in the environment for about 300 years (after 10 half-lives, only about 1/1000 will remain). Radioactive Cesium mimics potasssium and is recycled as a mcaronutrient and is bioconctrated and bioaccumulated as it moves up the food chains; it is conentrated in the endrocrine system, as well as in the heart, liver, pancreas, spleen stomach, brain, and intestines. Cesium has about a 120 day biological half-life (that is how long it will remain in the body), but if you live in a contaminated area and have to eat contaminated foods, you will always be exposed to it.
Posted by: Perimetr | Jan 20 2020 3:43 utc | 85
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