Re: Q Anon is the tip of the iceberg

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spudb...@aol.com

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Jan 23, 2021, 6:19:39 PM1/23/21
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I don't think we disagree much on the facts, merely that astronomers and physicists can get out of their depth as other lesser intellects do. That Nuke Winter was an irrelevant addition to the anti-nuke argument, was not that it was ridiculous, but that it was always one sided. That the sovs behavior was always  ignored, and that Maggie Thatcher was the evil one.  Sagan seemed to think that surrendering was infinitely better than nuclear extinction. Understandable, but a hysterical reaction to a threat.

Bart Weinstein agrees with your opinion that the physicists of both camps should have been praised for their weapons work, because it forced leaders to be rational actors. Interesting to note, that Hugh Everett the 3rd was himself a DoD physicist. I wonder if he believed that some of his world's died in a nuclear conflagration?


On Saturday, January 23, 2021 Lawrence Crowell <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On Friday, January 22, 2021 at 2:56:22 PM UTC-6 johnk...@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Jan 22, 2021 at 2:50 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Was Jimmy Carter and Ronny Reagan's decisions bad, to push Pershing missiles into NATO horribly wrong as a response to Breshnev's SS20's, because after a nuke war, the few survivors would freeze to death? 

There are 7.7 billion people on the earth, after a nuclear war if there was not a nuclear winter there would be billions of deaths but there would also be billions of survivors, but if there was a nuclear winter too then there would be few if any survivors and the human race could easily go extinct. And if you ask me what's the difference between 2 billion deaths and 7 billion deaths I'd say 5 billion. In questions of morality arithmetic CAN be used to find the proper thing to do.

In retrospect it's easy to see that putting medium-range ballistic missiles In Europe turned out to be a good idea, it helped keep the peace. And despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki I think it's pretty clear that nuclear weapons have saved more lives than they ended, that's why the second half of the 20th century was so much less bloody than the first half. In fact, right now is the least bloody time in the history of the world per capita. 

> I'd say the Nuke Winter argument was irrelevant even though pimped by Sagan and Postrel.

I'd say World War III will either cause a nuclear winter or it won't and it has nothing to do with political ideology it has to do with physics. And I must say that if I knew absolutely nothing about a subject and you said one thing and Sagan said the opposite I'd tend to believe Sagan.

> Thus, the opinions of scientists are not sacrosanct

But the opinion of that great thinker spudboy100 is?  By the way, does it say "spudboy100" on your driver's license? Is that the name you put on your income tax return? I'm not ashamed of what I write, that's why I always use my real name. 

 John K Clark

Spudboy100 is a nutcase IMO. I think much the same of Philip Benjamin or :Medinuclear. Both display highly confused thinking. They have also sort of rubbished up this list since they appeared. Their agendas tend to dominate things too much.

A nuclear war involving just a few hundred nuclear bombs would kill hundreds of millions. There are currently several thousand arrayed on missile systems. Back in the 1980s there were 10 times that number. A complete nuclear war would probably have wiped out most of the population of the northern hemisphere. Also consider that in the wake of a nuclear war the infrastructure we rely upon would be entirely destroyed. Does anyone thing the trucks would keep running to keep store shelves filled? As a result starvation and then disease would cull off the majority of survivors. 

Nuclear winter was somewhat controversial, but there were reasons to think something to it. The detonation of many thousands of nuclear bombs would clearly torch off fires that could merge into megafires. Only in places that are wetted with recent rains or monsoons would be spared the direct fires. If as the nuclear winter scenario suggested half of the biomass in the norther hemisphere were burned up, which could be a trillion tons or so, it is not unreasonable to think an enlarged Mt Pinatubo climate effect would ensue.

LC

LC

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John Clark

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Jan 24, 2021, 5:05:38 AM1/24/21
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On Sat, Jan 23, 2021 at 6:19 PM spudboy100 via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> I don't think we disagree much on the facts, merely that astronomers and physicists can get out of their depth as other lesser intellects do.

Scientists are always out of their depth, that's why their dominant emotion is confusion, and that's why it's a hard job, but at least they know they're out of their depth. Scientists are usually right but never certain; political and religious ideologues are always certain but seldom right.

> That Nuke Winter was an irrelevant addition to the anti-nuke argument,

How is the extinction of the human race irrelevant? World War III will either cause the extinction of human beings or it won't, the answer can be found with the application of physics and no political ideology, left right or center, will aid in finding that answer one bit. And to the defense department, which controls thousands of H-bombs, the answer to such a question might be rather important. 

> not that it was ridiculous, but that it was always one sided.

One sided? There's a good side to human extinction?

> Sagan seemed to think that surrendering was infinitely better than nuclear extinction.

It was never a binary choice, but if it was then yes, surrendering would be better than human extinction. What wouldn't be?

 > Bart Weinstein agrees with your opinion that the physicists of both camps should have been praised for their weapons work, because it forced leaders to be rational actors. Interesting to note, that Hugh Everett the 3rd was himself a DoD physicist. I wonder if he believed that some of his world's died in a nuclear conflagration?

Everett was disappointed at the poor reception his doctoral dissertation received and never published anything on quantum mechanics again for the rest of his life; instead he became a Dr. Strangelove type character making computer nuclear war games and doing grim operational research for the pentagon about armageddon. But he was one of the first to point out that any defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles would be ineffectual and building an anti-ballistic missile system could not be justified except for "political or psychological grounds". In his book "The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett"  Peter Byrne makes the case that Everett was the first one to convince high military leaders through mathematics and no nonsense non sentimental reasoning that a nuclear war could not be won, "after an attack by either superpower on the other, the majority of the attacked population that survived the initial blasts would be sterilized and gradually succumb to leukemia. Livestock would die quickly and survivors would be forced to rely on eating grains, potatoes and vegetables. Unfortunately the produce would be seething with radioactive Strontium 90 which seeps into human bone marrow and causes cancer". Linus Pauling credited Evertt by name and quoted from his pessimistic report in his Nobel acceptance speech for receiving the 1962 Nobel Peace prize.

Despite his knowledge of the horrors of a nuclear war Everett, like most of his fellow cold warrior colleagues in the 50's and 60's, thought the probability of it happening was very high and would probably happen very soon. Byrne speculates in a footnote that Everett may have privately used anthropic reasoning and thought that the fact we live in a world where such a war has not happened (at least not yet) was more confirmation that his Many Worlds idea was right.  Hugh's daughter Liz Everett killed herself a few years after her father's death, in her suicide note she said "Funeral requests: I prefer no church stuff. Please burn me and DON'T FILE ME. Please sprinkle me in some nice body of water or the garbage, maybe that way I'll end up in the correct parallel universe to meet up with Daddy".

John K Clark

Lawrence Crowell

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Jan 24, 2021, 2:53:58 PM1/24/21
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The problem the US had with strategic parity with the USSR was with conventional forces in Europe and NATO. Why this happened is the United States used an enormous amount to manpower and materiel in Vietnam. The commitment to the Vietnam war involved thousands of aircraft. 2 million men and 500,000 at most times during the war, and close to an equal number of civil servants and contractors. The Vietnam War was a huge effort and in the end a boondoggle.

The US commitment to NATO declined with this shift. In the mid to late 70s the USSR had over 2 or nearly 3 times the conventional manpower NATO had. Though US technology was largely more advanced this numerical asymmetry was a problem. The deployment of the SU22 IRBMs was meant to block a fallback NATO had with nuclear weapons. They hoped to checkmate the west. The Pershing system was though not developed under Reagan, but Carter. In fact most of the mainstay weapons, such as the F-teen fighters etc, were Carter programs and if not dated to Nixon. Reagan merely presided over their deployment.  

The Pershing system though upped the nuclear ante. The game of power and brinksmanship with the USSR went up a notch. After reducing tensions with the SALT treaties, aspects of the cold war began to reemerge. In the end the Soviet economy was stretched too thin and the system began to reel. This was made apparent with Chernobyl, where the Soviet reactor system was an old fashion graphite system that was inherently dangerous. They blinked and the rest is history.

LC

spudb...@aol.com

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Jan 24, 2021, 4:02:22 PM1/24/21
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Yeah, I read the book by Everett's son, who related the demise of his Everett's sister, by suicide as you have duly noted. I am suspecting that the novel by physicist Gregory Benford, Rewrite is precisely based on Everett's work, along with Bryce DeWitt, and nobelist John Archibald Wheeler. Basically, it's similar to Bill Murray's Groundhog Day, save that the protagonist gets to restart his life every time on his 16th birthday. His awareness of his former existence is occasionally shared by a few famous people, and thus, he attempts to nudge history a bit. 

My point is despite Sagan's' intellectual breadth he was in error in not wanting to face down the fun folks in the Kremlin. Facing down runs a higher risk of conflict, but then, so did surrender. My concern is that the easiness that the new Prez has with comrade Xi, seems a similar thing. That's my criticism and we shall soon see if it becomes a national concern, or not? If no, then skies are sunny everywhere. I find even brilliant people, with great intellectual capacity, become furious when their worldview is challenged. Did Sagan become pissed off? He never seemed to be to me. I still read his articles and purchased his books. 

It is essential to try to answer this rhetorical question, which should be directed to everyone, which is best, phrased, "Ok. what's your answer?" If the individual has an proposed answer, let's give it a think? If the person is simply venting, it may do the amygdala wonders, but for problem resolution, not so much. 


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spudb...@aol.com

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Jan 24, 2021, 7:48:04 PM1/24/21
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Yes Vietnam = fiasco, seemingly, because of the belief of it being a Domino Theory, as what happened with Stalin & Hitler's empire building in Europe. The demands of LBJ was to ship 500K troops to South Vietnam, where William Westmoreland just let the troops sit in situ while North Vietnam regular army, and the Viet Cong picked away at them. Not responding to the Soviets placing of SS-20's west into the Warsaw Pact would also have presented a risk. The Fulda Gap awaited a Soviet Invasion since 1945. Brezhnev had a international practice of starting 2 large wars in the middle east, by militarily underwriting any conflict there, plus guerilla warfare (called terrorism) hopefully, to draw the US in, as they did with Vietnam & Cambodia. The Soviet attempt to block Pershing missiles came with a massive political campaign. This was why there were enormous demonstrations against the Pershing's, Margaret Thatcher, and the US, called The Nuclear Freeze movement. It was war on the cheap, with the citizens of NATO countries being volunteers. Sure, nothing was worth a nuclear war, yet an expanding Soviet empire was surely the quickest way to get a nuclear conflict. These included prominent scientists as,
Linus C. Pauling, Hans A. Bethe, Konrad E. Bloch, Richard P. Feynman, Edward M. Purcell, Emilio Segre, William N. Lipscomb Jr., George Wald and Steven Weinberg. All greats, and all wrong in this serf's opinion.

The wisest thing to do, rather than stand down, sometimes, is to stand up, and give the 'enemy' a material reason not to attack, expand, pressure. The much faster SS20's, traveling thousands of miles per hour, physically closer because they were, as you pointed out medium ranges ballistics, and were of course cut the response time NATO had in reaction to these missiles striking. Carter's Cruise missiles speed was just over Mach-1, SS20's I believe, did Mach-4 at terminal velocity. My point is that all things should be discussed to analyze if our perceptions are true or not? Most scientists and engineers by their nature employ the capability of self correction. Yet many have been inaccurate or unhelpful, when they go ideological. Just as with anyone else, as with Lysenko, or the eugenicists, Fauci on the amount of people required to be immunized, and the response to AGW, considered opinions differed, and are different enough to impact policy and perception. 

Is it better to ban fracking (38% of US electricity relies upon gas turbines), as the new administration has mentioned, in order to save the earth, or is it better to experience rising costs and dwindling supplies of methane, as well as rolling blackouts and brownouts? I suspect that if we worked at Warp Speed on say, perovskite solar cells linked to greatly improved batteries, we could reduce natural gas use and release from wells and pipelines by nearly 90-100% in 7 years. Use, gas turbines only for load leveling and emergency power in case of heat waves and polar breakouts. This, I learned from sifting through expert opinions and sorting which had the most detailed information presented. This is all anyone can ask, to look rational at a condition, phenomena, based on the data, and not let authority be the deciding factor alone. 






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From: Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com>
To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sun, Jan 24, 2021 2:53 pm
Subject: Re: Q Anon is the tip of the iceberg

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