Apocalypse 18 Months From Now?

I think the real question is: how much will breaking with the President now innoculate the Republicans? They've been too close to him for too long. At the risk of sounding like Pollyanna, I really think the Republican party is doomed for a generation (ie, 10 to 20 years).

We seem, bizarrely, to be moving towards a consensus against the war in Iraq at the same time as maintaining a consensus on the desirability of starting a war with Iran.

What will get very sickening is after all these years, at the end of king george's reign, republicans will claim they've "seen the light" and will expect to be forgiven for all the b.s. we've gone through.

Brownback is already anti-surge, so that's a start.

I think the real question is when more Republicans will start seriously breaking with the White House over the war.

the problem the Presidential candidates have is that losing the 20-30 percent of the population that doesn't want politicians to go against Bush means that they lose more than half of the Republican base and can't win. Incumbent Republican Congressmen can expect considerable crossover voting from independents and weak-minded Democrats. I don't think you are going to see that kind of crossover voting for President

I think Eric U nails it.

Presumably, most Republican Presidential candidates would want support from someone like, say, me. And I'd go out of my way to make sure Chuck Hagel, or any other anti-war candidate, never gets any significant position in the party.

I don't know how many people like me there are in the party, but I doubt I'm completely unrepresentative. There are surely enough like-minded people in the party to make sure no anti-war candidate gets the nomination.

Moreover, while Bush himself would probably be fairly neutral as among most potential candidates, I think you'd see him actively opposing an anti-war candidate. And that would be a significant impediment to getting the nomination.

And what happens if the ground tremblors we have now turn into earthquakes on withdrawal?

Will that help the Dems?

It would be better if Dems could figure out how to make it work. Like authorize an army 200,000 stronger and force it on Bush.

Think of the after math of Vietnam - 100,000 murdered, 500,000 boat people, Pol Pot killing 2 million Cambodians - combined with internet communications speed. Dems will get hammered every day as "the party of mass murder". I couldn't think of a better gift for the Rs.

Dems are playing checkers on a chess board. You have to think farther in advance.

My sense is that Republican unpopularity is accelerating-- Republicans who have just gotten back from talking to their constituents in the provinces are the most frightened.

Hey, Matthew, just as a point of rhetoric and not giving the nuts on the other side ammunition to use against you, you might want to avoid the use of "collaborate" such as the above.

Yes, American empathy for dead foreigners is legendary --- it was such a winning issue for the Democrats when they protested Reagan's aid to Saddam Hussein in the mid-1980s. You remember.

I think you make my point tequila. There was no internet back then.

It is a different world since 1980.

And why did we aid Saddam back then? Well as a counter to Iran.

Think of FDR's getting chummy with Uncle Joe. Was FDR wrong?

Until we get off ME oil we have an interest in that region.

Here is how:

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

I think the real question is when more Republicans will start seriously breaking with the White House over the war. (Matt)

They can try, but it won't help them much if at all. Maybe 5% of voters pay enough attention to politics to notice something like that; and half of them will consider it theatrical hypocrisy.

It would take something on the scale of 9/11 to save Republicans from getting swept everywhere but the South.

What happens if we do not keep the oil flowing for every one?

Decline and Fall

Followed by:

Desolation Row

Think of the after math of Vietnam - 100,000 murdered, 500,000 boat people, Pol Pot killing 2 million Cambodians - combined with internet communications speed. Dems will get hammered every day as "the party of mass murder". I couldn't think of a better gift for the Rs.

And yet, despite the fact that it was a Democratic Congress that cut off funds for Vietnam, no one has ever tarred them as "the party of mass murder." This is lunacy.

The political risk for the Democrats in the long run is the same as a Vietnam risk - would they end up tarred as "weak"? It's got nothing to do with the humanitarian problems that follow withdrawal, and any cursory reading of American history will make that obvious.

Easy Low Cost No Radiation Fusion

Wait, your solution is cold fusion?? Awesome!

Gary,

Watch what happes in Congress. The Republicans won the last election in the South.

There are 47 Blue Dog Democrats in the House. They are not liberal Democrats.

Check out the blow up between Pelosi and Reid on earmarks. Pelosi knows where her votes come from. Reid is incompetent and probably a crook (given his opposition to earmark reform). A Republican spearheaded the opposition to Reid in the Senate.

All is not what it seems.

I don't know how many people like me there are in the party, but I doubt I'm completely unrepresentative. There are surely enough like-minded people in the party to make sure no anti-war candidate gets the nomination.

This is true, but there should also be enough people in the Republican who are either (a) vaguely in touch with the reality of the war or (b) at least would prefer not to lose in a landslide in 2008, and thus who will push for a Hagel or a Brownback. The question to me is how the Republicans can heal this fissure, unless Bush gets behind some sort of quasi-withdrawl plan within the year. I don't see how it works.

Nearly two years can be an eternity, but I think that as it stands, Dennis Kucinich might be able to win the presidency in 2008.

DivGuy,

Nope. A form of hot fusion first invented in 1957 and currently used in portable electrically controlled neutron generators. Turn the electricity on and the fusion starts. Turn it off and it stops. If instead of Deuterium-Tritium reactions (which produce neutrons) we used Boron11 and Hydrogen you get very few neutrons and lots of energy. Boron11 is very abundant.

Try reading. It often adds to one's intellectual base.

M. Simon: you don't get to post about lunatic alternative energy sources and patronise people. One or the other; not both.

DivGuy,

Uh, you don't spend much time in Republican circles. They are tarred as the party of mass murder for Vietnam. It keeps coming up more frequently when pull out is discussed.

What such a debacle would do in the current environment (www) is connect mass murder in Vietnam with mass murder in the ME.

It would be very hard to escape.

BTW I changed from D to R in the 1980s because of mass murder in Vietnam. And I supported the pull out and funds cut off in '75. Occasionally people learn the error of their ways.

ajay,

What do you know about Bussard Fusion Reactions first discovered by Farnsworth? Bussard was a Deputy Director in the AEC. You suppose he might know something?

I'm patronising towards ignorance.

You could always get educated before dismissing anothers arguments.

Milton Friedman:

"You cannot be sure you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do."

Uh, you don't spend much time in Republican circles. They are tarred as the party of mass murder for Vietnam. It keeps coming up more frequently when pull out is discussed.

That's nice. Even if it were true - and it's not, you're now talking about neoconservatives, not mainstream republicans - it would be immaterial to the issue of whether withdrawal would be a political loser for the Democrats. No one is saying that the Democrats will win over Bush's 30%, the dead-enders like yourself and Al, we're saying it's the other 70% that the Democrats will take more than their typical share of, if current trends continue.

M. Simon,

Oh, so THAT's who's tarring the D's as the "party of mass murder." Yes, 100,000 killed after the war and 500,000 boat people were horrible outcomes, but Vietnamese casualties during the war were on the order of 1,000,000, many caused directly by US forces. Are we responsible for mass murder by leaving, or by being there in the first place? Our stated intent in being there was to prevent an outcome like what happened, but we couldn't have won a Vietnamese civil war (oh no, I'm a defeatocrat!), so all we did was add to the killing.

As for the 2 million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot, that too was a horror, but do you think it might have had something to do with the destabilization of that country by both the North Vietnamese and us?

You live in a fantasy world where: a) the deaths we caused in the Vietnam War didn't happen; b) an outside power can win someone else's civil war; and c) the horrors of the killing fields were only a consequence of us leaving southeast Asia, and in no a way a consequence of us having been there in the first place.

The fusion thing is hillarious.

M. Simon's blog has a post about how Muslim's aren't very good at science...it's right next to some Christian Zionist kookery.

You're not taking into account the imminent new reality of war with Iran.

At every successive crisis in the past few years we've hopefully thought, "This is it!", that the lawbreaking would be too much, that the neoconservatives would be too baldly aggressive, that something would right the ship. What we're seeing instead, however, are successive unmaskings of pure power.

Karl,

Good points.

Still politics is not direct logic. And our support of Pol Pot was wrong (I screwed the pooch on that one too).

So it is wise to be on the side of calling for success in a situation where it is obvious succes is desireable. You never know how the politics will turn.

And yes I'm a neo-con (Jewish former Democrat who believes self government is a good idea and not just a good idea for Americans - you know John Kennedy ideals.). I do come into contact with a lot of non-neocon Republicans. The Vietnam thing is mentioned often. It is bubling just below the surface. A bad move by the Ds could cause an erruption. So be careful out there.

Are you the guy who keeps writing the "From Time Immemorial" style letters for The Rock River Times?

Ed,

How is your physics? Care to explain the physics objections to the idea? I was a nuclear reactor operator in anothter life and would be glad to explain it to you if you have any questions. So since you have studied the pohysics tell me what your objection is so I can answer you.

BTW the Christian Zionist thing was put on in part by Democrat Tom Lantos.

I guess there are too many Jewish Democrats in Congres eh? Well the Rs would be happy to have them.

Ed,

No that is not me. I use my own name everywhere.

I'm the guy that did the anti-drug war stuff from about 2000 to about early 2003.

Here is one I reposted at my place:

Heroin

BTW the Christian Zionist piece quotes Tom Lantos extensively.

Christian Zionism

And I would not go around bashing Christianity too much. The Blue Dog Democrats might not like it. There are 40 some in the House. LOL

From the above:

Rep. Lantos then said, “All Christians, please stand.”

Really if you look at the election results the D party has moved to the right. Get with the program.

Any Democrat who supports a war against Iran will lose the 2008 presidential nomination. Nobody is going to fall for the electability trap this time. And no Republican who refuses to support either a war with Iran or the war in Iraq will be able to win most nominations for national office. As a result, it's hard to see how the Republicans avoid a blood bath, unless they start a war with Iran and try to force as many Democrats to support it as possible. You would all do extremely well to learn that lesson. Supporting a war with Iran is supporting the Republican party by default.

M.Simon, go sell your stupid elsewhere. Seriously, what the fuck are you smoking? You're statement is so ridiculous that it's beyond reason, and as such you're beyond reasoning with. People are turning against fundamentalists. We're tired of Christians or Zionists or any other religious extremists telling us what we're allowed to think, say or read. We don't like you people. Increasingly, Americans don't like you people. That won't stop until you get out of politics and stop trying to tell other people what to do.

I wouldn't count on seeing a lot of Republican senators turn on Bush. Certainly the war makes them nervous, but their calculation is that in 2008, with the war still raging, the country will have to choose between a battle-hardened veteran, McCain, and a Democratic nominee who is either a woman(HC), a senate neophyte (BO) or a one-term senator who looks like he's just out of college (JE). They're guessing that a worried electorate will choose the military man to lead us out of the mess.

I failed to note that Lantos is a D.

Probably obvious but, I wanted to make it explicit.

Any way if any one wants to discuss the fusion stuff (or any thing else) leave a comment at the above article (or on any post). I get notified by e-mail of every posting any where on my site and will respond to intelligent discussion.

If you want to say something stupid that is OK too. I'll leave it up for the world to see. I may or may not respond however.

It has been fun.

Keep in mind though. Liberals did not put the Dems in charge. Dean's Southern Strategy did. Brilliant on his part but it has changed the party.

M, you're talking physics on a political blog, and 'free power' is something that high school physics says cannot happen, so this is hardly the right place to be advocating it.

If you have truly found a way to create free or almost free power, you'll have to convince some people who know the science you're dealing with before we can believe you. I've read all kinds of conspiracy theories (I'm a Nikola Tesla fan, myself), but, in the modern world of scientific peer review, none of them ever actually pan out, about "mad" scientists who were shunned by fellow scientists, and the like. If you have something, first, patent it -- if you're that confident, then prove it or get it proven.

If you don't think some major corporate entity will let you do it, talk to someone like Apple, who would dearly love to eliminate batteries from their portable product line.

Also, Kennedy was not a friggin' neocon. He'd actually served in the military.

I think it's kind of amusing: cold fusion, Chrisitian Zionism, drugs.

Reads like the product of Lost Weekend at the AEI convention

Tom Lantos is a creepy, murderous, colostomy bag.

Uh, it is not free power it is Boron Hydrogen fusion. The reaction is well understood. What Bussard has done is to figure out how to make a commercial go of it. He presented the talk liked at my blog to Google.

I guess if you don't understand what you are talking about it is wise not to criticize. Or else you can get educated.

As I said above - be glad to help.

And yes Kennedy was a neo-con and served in the Navy as I did. Neocon thought has a long pedigree in the Dem party. The Rs used to resist. Now the Rs are on board and the Ds resist. As Zell Miller said - he didn't change - his party did.

Well ta ta again (I know its an addiction - I can't help myself). LOL

"What will get very sickening is after all these years, at the end of king george's reign, republicans will claim they've "seen the light" and will expect to be forgiven for all the b.s. we've gone through."

I won't forgive them.

Just sayin.

I completely agree with Novak and Drum. If McCain runs, he'll campaigning on a platform of pushing a war that has already been repudiated by 60-70% of the population. The best analogy to a McCain campaign would be the Reagan/Mondale election of 1984 in which Mondale promised a tax increase in his acceptance speech. There is very little chance of the other Republican candidates being very popular either. In this extremely promising context (and I've been arguing this since mid-December on my own blog), the chances of the first female or first black president taking office with nice majorities in both the House and the Senate are extremely good. The only question will be whether a Democratic administration/Congress will be capable of cleaning up the enormous mess left by the Bush administration.

"Think of the after math of Vietnam - 100,000 murdered, 500,000 boat people, Pol Pot killing 2 million Cambodians - combined with internet communications speed. Dems will get hammered every day as "the party of mass murder". I couldn't think of a better gift for the Rs."

In addition to the responses others have made to this assertion, I would add a couple of thoughts: (1) other than those who would back Bush and the Republicans under any and all circumstances, few voters are likely to forget who started this mess and who grossly mishandled the occupation, making the horrible result you mention all-too-likely; and (2) if it's hard to believe that voters will conclude that it was the Dems fault whether Bush gets his woefully inadequate 20K surge or not. Though it obviously won't happen, everyone knows that if Bush and the Republicans were serious about preventing the type of bloodbath we all fear, he and they would be proposing increasing the troop strength by a large multiple of 20K -- and would have done so long ago. It didn't and won't happen -- and the Dems can't and won't be blamed for that.

"Will Chuck Hagel move out of the 'sounds smart, acts useless' camp and actually collaborate with anti-war Democrats on bringing this farce to an end? Does someone in the GOP presidential field decide to differentiate themselves by calling for an end to the madness?"

Brownback already has and Hagel just did. The pro-war GOP front is crumbling -- on the brink of caving in completely, I think. The next few months will be an interesting test both of Rove's residual ability to impose discipline in the ranks, and the influence of the conservative nutroots, which remains blindly dedicated to Der Fuehrer's dreams of ultimate victory.

Will fanaticism or political self interest triumph? The modern Republican versions of the immovable object and the irresistable force collide.

Somebody pass the popcorn.

I really think the Republican party is doomed for a generation (ie, 10 to 20 years). (Jim W)

I agree that the GOP is doomed in 2008, and rightfully so. But I think the Democrats, though not as corrupt as the Republicans, are still too corrupt to hold on for anything like 10 to 20 years.

Anyway, the American preference for politicians who look like football coaches over politicians who look like history professors won't go away - another reason why the Republicans will be back.

When I spoke to a plasma physicist at Texas A&M about one version of the electromagnetically accellerated boron-proton fusion schemes, he told me that a lot of these results are suggestive but misleading. Sure, you can use simple devices to accelerate particles to speeds that approximate the temperatures needed to fuse borons and protons. But the problem is in equating these particle speeds to temperatures. Particles in a thermal distribution come in lots of different speeds, centered around a peak in the center (which is what we call the temperature). But fusion doesn't happen at the peak--it happens at the tail of the distribution. Non-thermal particles have to reach much higher speeds than what you'd expect to reach the energy needed to ignite fusion.

I've loved the idea of boron-proton fusion every since I read the Monkhorst paper in Science back in the mid-1990s. But it's gonna take more than tearing apart someone's Trinitron to make it happen.

Soullite:

Any Democrat who supports a war against Iran will lose the 2008 presidential nomination.

I think the opposite is true. The conventional wisdom is that Iran must be kept from getting nukes at all costs. Any presidential candidate who dissents from that will be tagged 'not serious', and also 'anti-semitic'.

"Will Chuck Hagel move out of the 'sounds smart, acts useless' camp and actually collaborate with anti-war Democrats on bringing this farce to an end?[...]

Brownback already has and Hagel just did.

I think Mr. Yglesias is espousing a more healthily-skeptical wait-and-see attitude, especially since Hagel has a long record of taking positions critical of the administration, then capitulating to absolutely everything the White House wants when it's time to actually vote on legislation or use the subpoena power. And Brownback can't repudiate too much Middle East intervention; Iran needs to be nuked till it glows in order to protect Israel. After all, Israel needs to be kept safe until the official, Jesus-approved mass slaughter of the heathen Jews.

I looked over some abstracts and citation lists on Web of Science. Bussard's work is published in aparently reputable journals, and frequently cited, though he is not very prolific. These are not self-citations by co-authors, or circle-jerk citations by collaborators.

The fusion is quite real, unlike the cold-fusion fiasco. What seems like the biggest problems are energy break even and durability of the equipment. The conventional fusion reactor has achieved energy break even already, the next step for it is economic break even.

One advantage Bussard has is that he could fail to accomplish his goal much more cheaply than the big fusion project.

jlw,

The really neat thing about the Bussard Reactor is that the particle speeds in the reaction area are not thermally distributed. They are all moving at around the speed determined by the potential gradient. Just as the speeds of particles in a linear accelerator are nearly idenitical.

You do have the vector problem but the pariicles oscillate into and out of the reaction space. The vectors are all into or out of the reaction space.

Really, go to my link and watch the video. I had to see it several times to get all the points he was making.

In addition I have links to the papers that describe the science, the reaction rates, etc.

After you have watched the video I think I can answer any of your questions.

You have made a really austute observation about thermal equilibrium. Which is why the Bussard reactor is so interesting.

Njorl,

Some very good points.

Bussard says that his idea could be proved or disproved for $200 million and 5 years of effort.

So far "conventional fusion" has cost multi billions and has gone on for many decades. With no end in sight because of the thermal equilibrium problem.

Look at the video of the talk he gave at Google. A neat physics lecture if nothing else.

The impending election will be "impacted" by the impending attack on Iran. Karl "man, have I got brains or what?!" Rove thinks that this attack will completely shift the conversation and leave Bush (and the GOP) with high marks and a winnable election.

Those of us who don't have a need for anti-psychotic drugs realize what a mistake this kind of idea is. It's the same magical thinking that postulated that putting up a "Mission Accomplished" banner would cause the insurgents to drop their rifles and become docile members of the new American satellite.

The GOP had better move quickly to save it's own skin by disowning Bush and company. Don't buy into the notion that you can simply "re-brand" yourself and leave this baggage behind. People will easily be able to trace your provenance and at any rate, will recognize the same hackneyed ideas wrapped up with new packaging. You are doomed unless you cut your losses now and get out of the war-market without delay (literally and figuratively).

Karl:

As for the 2 million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot, that too was a horror, but do you think it might have had something to do with the destabilization of that country by both the North Vietnamese and us?

Aside from that argument, it makes no sense to treat Cambodia as a vindication of the domino theory. Indigenous Communist forces took over Cambodia even as South Vietnam was being overrun by the NVA. Phnom Penh fell a few days before Saigon.

It's not at all obvious how keeping an American army in South Vietnam would have kept Pol Pot from taking over Cambodia.

Surrendering to the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq will CERTAINLY doom the Republican party, and for AT LEAST one generation. It will also doom Iraq, Iran, moderate and reformer Muslims, and the rest of us, for that long and longer.

Having said that, staying in Iraq and not stabilizing and winning will do the same.

But according to Michael Yon and the other bloggers who are actually on the ground in Iraq, the war is very winnable.

If Iran acquired a nuclear weapon, or at least made a whole lot of noise claiming to be close, are we absolutely convinced Americans aren't so scared of terrorism that they would run into McCain's arms?

But according to Michael Yon and the other bloggers who are actually on the ground in Iraq, the war is very winnable.

I've read Yon's blog, and he doesn't impress me as a particularly critical thinker.

"Surrendering to the terrorists and insurgents in Iraq will CERTAINLY doom the Republican party, and for AT LEAST one generation. It will also doom Iraq, Iran, moderate and reformer Muslims, and the rest of us, for that long and longer."

Considering that they initiated a war with "evidence" they knew was bogus against a country that was no conceivable threat to the U.S. (or anyone else, for that matter), the terrorists in this situation have been the Bush administration, and there is simply no other realistic way to view this. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been the inadvertent victims of this act of terrorism, dwarfing the numbers that died on 9/11 (and need I say that neither Iraq or Iran had *anything* to do with that day?), and you expect that by remaining there, that the Army that killed these innocent people will be able to subdue Iraq by additional force?

With every new accidental death that their presence in a combat zone invariably causes, a dozen vows of retribution are made. With every broken down door (in search of insurgents), our soldiers leave these poor, hapless people vulnerable to the violence around them. When they attempt to keep weapons for home defense (which the NRA would insist is a natural right), these weapons are confiscated and the men of the house dragged off to prisons as "insurgents". In the prisons they are tortured into confessing to crimes they haven't committed or if they are turned over to a prison that is controlled by a rival religious sect, they are tortured for their presumed heresy. The presence of our military has these people locked into an impossible position from which there is no escape.

We have become the source of a lethal infection in the Middle East and by implying that we *must* stay there and "win", you've shown just how little you understand about what is actually happening and what the effect of ill-conceived decisions made at a distance really is. Dick Cheney's 40 years of war will not make the U.S. more secure, it will simply make us into history's most repulsive villains. Only a half-wit would lack the ability to put that together and only a quarter wit would defend the principal behind it. Our soldiers have sworn an oath to defend their country and that vow should never be abused. Have you ever taken a moment to reflect on the situation that this war has put them in? Simply reverse the scenario and imagine that foreign troops have, without provocation, taken over the United States and that the same percentage of civilian deaths that Iraq has suffered were referred to as "collateral damage". You and I as patriots would do anything we could to undermine and destroy this occupying force and we would be considered patriots for doing it. What malfunctioning part of your brain allows you to block that out? You wouldn't passively roll over for an occupation, and neither will the Iraqis! The application of more force will simply increase their hatred and determination....*just like it would for you and me!!*

I don't give a damn what happens to the GOP, but if they don't start to view things realistically, they will be history. I do, on the other hand, care deeply about what happens to our soldiers and to Iraqis. We have to leave as quickly as possible so that they can form a government that isn't perceived as "Vichy Iraqi" and we have to abandon any further construction of "super-bases" there rather than continue to spread the contamination that the Bush administration has spread there. To continue on the path of the 40 year war is as pure a manifestation of madness that history has ever witnessed. That the U.S. is the source of this ought to deeply trouble any patriot.

I was a nuclear reactor operator in anothter life

The one animated by Matt Groening?

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