RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-fusion-works-and-why-its-a-breakthrough-national-ignition-facility-laser-beam-laboratory-science-nuclear-weapon-11671052081?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The Energy Department has announced the first gain in energy from fusion in a laboratory—the first time fusion reactions produced more energy than it took to induce them. Last week 192 laser beams at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility heated and compressed a capsule of hydrogen to previously unattainable temperatures and pressures, igniting fusion reactions that produced 50% more energy than the laser beams had delivered.

Nuclear reactions can release the energy that binds together protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus. Nuclear power plants use fission, not fusion. Fission releases energy when a large uranium nucleus splits into two radioactive fragments, which carry the energy as they fly apart.

Fusion, by contrast, relies on the universe’s smallest atom, hydrogen. Energy is released when two hydrogen nuclei combine to produce a helium nucleus and a neutron. Unlike fission, fusion produces no radioactive fragments. Fusion is much harder to induce than fission, since the hydrogen nuclei must be heated to nearly 100 million degrees Celsius to overcome the electrical repulsion that hinders their reaction. Stars run on fusion energy, but on Earth it has previously been released only in thermonuclear explosions. This stunning new result in laboratory fusion opens doors for unprecedented studies in basic and applied science.

The concept of laser fusion had been pursued without success since the 1960s and it became a central part of a 1990s program to ensure continued confidence in the nuclear-weapons stockpile without underground testing. Although scientists knew that high-powered laser beams could probe the properties of matter relevant to the early stages of detonating a nuclear weapon, the goal of laser fusion would allow for studies in the later stages. It would also challenge and demonstrate the ability to understand and predict the dynamics of hot, dense matter more generally.

Construction of the ignition facility at the Livermore lab began in 1997, and experiments attempting ignition began soon after construction was completed in 2009. The design and construction of the world’s most powerful laser was an engineering triumph, but three years of failed attempts to achieve fusion ignition brought the program close to cancellation in 2012. But the program continued with a more deliberate approach that included outside peer review.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/13/the-wasteland-of-leftist-compassion/

Compassion is one of the greatest of human virtues. But effective compassion comes with an obligation to do more than what merely feels and sounds good. Public policies motivated by compassion must also consider the full complexity of the challenge—the unintended consequences and the reality of human nature—and strike a balance between what is desired and what is possible. Often the most beneficial expressions of compassion appear harsh and punitive, yet in offering more lasting and comprehensive solutions, do more to alleviate human suffering.

Without taking a balanced and holistic approach to compassion, special interests hijack public policy and reap perpetual profits working on problems that never go away. For them, ineffective compassion is good business. But it leaves behind a wasteland.

If envy and resentment are the currency of the Left—driving, as it does, their attacks on privilege and their demands for equity—then compassion is the gold that backs their currency. Emotional appeals to voters and politicians demanding displays of compassion are the means by which the Left claims the moral high ground. And in those appeals, and the misguided policies that result, entire industries are created—industries populated by individuals whose careers depend on perpetuating the fraud.

In many cases, the consequences of unbalanced compassion are obvious, as anyone can see if they visit the coastal cities of California. It was compassion that motivated state legislators to decriminalize hard drug addiction, now dubbed “substance use disorder.” Compassion was the moral justification to empty California’s prisons and downgrade property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. 

Compassion compelled politicians and judges to rewrite laws that kept mentally ill people safely off the streets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-battle-of-brittney/

Bringing home Brittney Griner was an easy call for the Biden Junta, an “equity” demo, in the run-up to Christmas, that gives the Delaware Democrat the appearance of a victory. For all but the willfully blind, the trade of a basketball player for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was an exceptionally bad deal.

Bout has sold sophisticated Russian weaponry to terrorist groups and Communist revolutionaries alike. Before his capture in a sting operation, Bout was poised to sell 100 surface-to-air missiles, 20,000 AK-47 rifles, and five tons of explosives to FARC the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. “We are together in this,” Bout explained, the Americans “are my enemies also.”

This global arms dealer was traded straight across for a basketball player who brought marijuana products into Russia and pleaded guilty to charges.

“This is playing Putin’s game,” former CIA man John Sipher tweeted “Bout was an actual criminal charged through a credible legal process recognized around the world. Griner was a hostage taken in order to extort us.” This successful extortion traces back to the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

As Paul Kengor noted in The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor,  Obama’s strongest influence was an African American Communist dedicated to an all-white Soviet dictatorship. American missile defense played a major role in taking down the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Russia also objected to American missile defense and Obama was hopeful for change.