Am I Blue

You betcha! Born and raised and currently residing in New England. Two pieces of recent news makes clear that the Blue is smarter than the Red. Not to mention that the Blue has been supporting all those Welfare Shitkickers in the Red states for generations. FDR gave them clean water, electricity, roads, and most of the other basic facilities of civilized living, and what do they do? Vote for oligarches whose primary goal is the keep the Shitkickers down. Panty waists like Biden continue to delude themselves into believing that the shithole county folks will actually vote for the politicians who actually seek to make their lives better. They've figured out that the Debbie Dummy Democrats will still lavish support on them, no matter what. Stupid is as stupid does. On both sides.

Y'all must know by now that 95%+ of Covid-δ infections are the unvaccinated in Red states? Boy howdy. So, let's go bail them out of their stupidity!! May be it's time for some Tough Love?

As has been said here more times than most readers need: there are no Blue states and Red states if you look closely enough, just Blue cities and Red shithole counties. The former are where the smart people go to make progress for themselves and the community as a whole. The latter, alas, are the places that the morons stay and bitch that city folk live a much better existence and took away their slaves in The War of Northern Aggression. There's a song from the WWI period (yes, that long ago) which sums up the problem: "How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm (After They've Seen Paree)?". Yes? It is well documented that shithole counties are getting older, whiter, sicker, and dumber as young folk with any smarts get the hell out as soon as they can. And they go to cities, where their smarts can be put to good use.

Now, we have the results of the wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 Census. As expected, though not by those who were afraid that wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's minions could put a fat thumb on the scales, cities continue to grow and shithole counties continue to shrink. Not even Viagra will help all those aggrieved old white men get it up. Every news org has a write up; pick the one you normally read. And media, politics, and data wonks are having at it, too. Some take the positive view that this is yet the next nail in the coffin of the Old Persecuted White Guy network. Others take the pessimistic view that, at least in the near term, Right Wing control in so many states will be able to gerrymander their way out of disaster this time.

For myself, I lean more positive than negative. I find it less likely that gerrymandering will gift seats to the Republicans, and, absent draconian voter suppression working, state-wide races will become ever more dependent on city dwellers. That's good for the thinking individual.

The second bit of news is kind of mind boggling. It's not Cold Fusion (which only manifested as a poor data programming tool), but might be nearly as spectacular

"If you go to a much higher magnetic field, you can go to a much smaller size," said Bob Mumgaard, a plasma physicist who is chief executive of Commonwealth. He said that if it was possible to build a device just one-fiftieth the size of the planned reactor in France — which will be roughly as big as a soccer field — it would be able to generate almost as much power.

Much like the difference between American and Russian nukes in the 1950s: they went for big and easy, we went with small and difficult.

Commonwealth's new magnet, which will be one of the world's most powerful, will be a crucial component in a compact nuclear fusion reactor known as a Tokamak, a design that uses magnetic forces to compress plasma until it is hotter than the sun. The reactor looks like a doughnut-shaped jar surrounded by magnets. Soviet physicists originally envisioned it in the 1950s.

I recall reading up on Tokamak back when I was in college. Kind of a Sputnik experience. While most fusion is built around lasers, these folks are going with mega-magnets. We'll see who's best. I wouldn't bet against MIT, though.