Danger Close

If history teaches us anything, it's that unintended consequences are the most likely outcome of any historical event. The unanswered question is always: "Who will learn the lesson?"

Vladimir Putin clearly learnt one when he invaded Ukraine, but the forces he set in motion have not come to a halt. Rulers such as Putin don't know how to stop until they get what they want, so we can only guess where the correlation of forces is leading.

The danger rests in the fact that Putin has no exit strategy. The only hope for the West, and Ukraine, is in the Kremlin leadership deposing him. Otherwise, the minimum danger is of a nuclear 'demonstration'. Such a demonstration would involve a nuclear attack on an uninhabited area. Such a demonstration was proposed as an option against the Japanese as an alternative to the attack on Hiroshima, but abandoned. It was decided that the Japanese would perceive such a n on-attack as a sign of weakness.

I hold the Biden Asministration foreign policy team in the lowest possible regard. If Tony Blinken is a fool, Jake Sullivan is an idiot. I hope they are making plans. They need to be at their very best.

One September Day

On this September day,

One last time,

That small island

Might just seem,

The center of the world,

As so many wept

God save the Queen.

Labor Day in Deep Space

Today is Labor Day, a lesser holiday to all except those devoted to the backyard barbecue. A real landmark today is the 45th anniversary of Voyager I’s launch. That aged satellite is now over 14.6 billion miles from earth, having completed its primary mission of touring the gas giants of our solar system. It, and its sister, Voyager II, have now exited our solar system and will continue on forever (unless one of them collides with some cosmic object) in hopes that they will eventually encounter another civilization. Both Voyagers carry messages of earth on gold records. Why gold? For its durability? Yes. Why a record? Forty-five years ago, that’s how we transferred data. The fact is, when the Voyagers were born, the phonograph record was our standard. They’ve been gone that long, and NASA has been monitoring them that long. The Voyagers weren’t meant to function into the twenty-first century, but their engineers built them well. Still, their plutonium reactors are gradually running down, producing less and less electricity, and their feeble radio signals will soon go silent. At that point they will continue sailing through deep space at 35,000 miles per hour, carrying our hope that they might someday encounter another civilization, giving them the first hint of a distant civilization.