'Newspeak' comes to the Energy Department

In George Orwell's novel, 1984, a totalitarian regime now rules the homeland and operates by three slogans: 1) War is peace, 2) freedom is slavery and 3) ignorance is strength. In 1984 the term "Newspeak" refers to what is essentially a mandatory style guide for using the English language under that regime by substituting Newspeak formulations for common words and phrases so as to make public discourse conform to the ruling party's orthodoxy. (For a list Newspeak words and phrases, check here.)

Not surprisingly, failure to conform to this style in written and oral communications is considered a crime. In fact, to think thoughts contrary to those expressed in Newspeak terms is considered a "thoughtcrime" because it implies one's personal values are not in harmony with official party dogma. Even having a facial expression that appears to imply disagreement with that dogma is a "facecrime."

Every modern regime tries to regulate the language used by its citizens (or subjects, as the case may be). As I have written previously, "If you want to corrupt a people, corrupt the language." So, it's not particularly surprising that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), now controlled by an oil industry insider, has put out its own Newspeak-like manual in the form of an email to department employees which is focused on subtracting words and phrases according to Politico. In the email the DOE is doing to the vocabulary of its personnel what the Trump administration is doing to the government, namely, cutting it.

Taking a break - no post this week

I am taking a break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, October 19.

AI vs humans: The 'singularity' keeps getting postponed

Sam Altman is the CEO of the most visible artificial intelligence (AI) organization on the planet, OpenAI, the purveyors of the popular ChatGPT AI interface. His job is to keep the investment dollars flowing into OpenAI, tens of billions of them. So, it's pretty important for Altman to keep investors interested and to promise them breakthroughs...and also, apparently, to reschedule those breakthroughs when they don't occur.

Now, something that most people don't understand about OpenAI is that despite being recently valued at $500 billion, OpenAI loses money, reportedly $5 billion last year on sales of $3.7 billion. Back in 2023 Altman was telling the public that OpenAI had achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). For those who don't know, AGI means intelligence capable of learning and executing all the tasks that humans can do. No one appears to know how exactly to measure whether a machine can do the totality of things a human can do, but it sounds very cool to talk about it. And, it's the kind of talk that keeps investors excited. The implication, of course, is that the investor class won't have to put up with pesky employees much longer for most jobs.

The moment when this happens, when machines become smarter than humans and start running everything for us —as if they don't already—is sometimes called the singularity, usually with a capital "S." Now, singularity has a specific meaning in physics. In this context it refers to a nonreligious, tech version of the rapture in which technological advancement becomes very rapid as machines take over and iterate on technical innovation. We know what happens to people in the religious version of the rapture—some ascend to heaven and others are left behind. But we aren't exactly sure what is to become of humans after the so-called singularity version of the rapture since supposedly there won't be much work to do. AI will be doing it.

Fracking wastewater now endangers both drinking water and the wells that regurgitate the wastewater

There's an old saying that I won't spell out completely, but which most readers will certainly have heard at least once in their lives, to wit: "Don't sh-- where you eat." It is an all-purpose warning about not pursuing incompatible activities in the same place, particularly activities that produce either physical waste or emotional complications.

In this case the waste part is wastewater emitted by oil wells drilled into shale deposits which must undergo extensive hydraulic fracturing (often called fracking) before the oil can be freed. What most people do not know is that for every barrel of shale oil extracted, three to five barrels of water laden with fracking chemicals and salt, toxic minerals and radioactivity (from the deep rock) also comes up, most of it water originally injected under high pressure to fracture the shale and release the oil.

Some 9 millions barrels a days of shale oil is currently produced in the United States each day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That means between 27 and 45 million barrels of fracking wastewater is produced EACH DAY; in gallons that's between 1.1 and 1.9 billion gallons. And, of course, multiply by 365 and you'll get yearly totals. That's a lot of wastewater and it has to go somewhere and that somewhere is starting to pollute underground water supplies and surface soil and water, and to interfere with oil production itself.

Can authoritarians solve our environmental problems?

If you are deeply concerned about our environmental future, if you believe climate change is an existential issue, if you think toxics in soil, water and air are a major contributor to disease and to rapid fertility decline in humans and perhaps other animals, if you believe that the catastrophic decline of insect populations is something more than a convenient development for outdoor living but rather a sign of biodiversity collapse, if you wonder how increasingly over-exploited natural resources including water, soil, fossil fuels and metals can keep up with growing populations and growing demand, if you are worried about some or all of these things, then you may have been wondering in the last couple of decades whether democratic governments will actually do anything significant to reverse the negative trends in these areas.

The answer so far is not much. Perhaps you have asked yourself if the public and corporations need to be forced to do the right things when it comes to addressing our existential environmental threats. Well, democracies can force them with laws; but so far the laws and their enforcement in most countries do not appear to be anywhere near enough to change the crisis trajectory all of human civilization is now on.

That may be part of why more countries are turning to authoritarian leaders. There are, of course, many other reasons: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, poor response to natural disasters, anger over stagnant or falling living standards, and cultural conflict over the role of women and minorities in society to name a few. But when you look at this list you can see that it can be linked in most cases with proliferating climate change effects (such droughts that lead to migration), rising prices due to over-exploitation of resource supplies including energy (which can lead to falling living standards and crime), and cultural retrenchment which occurs in times of societal stress (in this case, the reassertion of male dominance and dominance for racial majorities that feel they are losing out to racial minorities).

The myth of managing the biosphere

A recent piece in New Scientist has reminded me that it is a myth that humans, if they are wise and clever enough, can learn to "manage" the biosphere.

The piece is about the unfortunate trade-off between pollution reduction and global warming. It has been known for some time that successful efforts to reduce air pollution have resulted in fewer particles in the atmosphere, particles that reflect sunlight back into space. This reduction has actually accelerated global warming even as it has improved air quality and reduced illness and death.

The warning in the New Scientist piece comes from imagining a scenario in which world governments somehow agree on global action to curb warming climate by "spraying reflective particles into the stratosphere that dim the sun. The strategy works: temperatures at ground level stabilise, and life goes on as normal despite escalating carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere."

Wars and rumors of wars: America, Europe, Russia and China

We have the ancient Roman writer Vegetius to thank for the phrase: "If you want peace, prepare for war." The phrase itself was adapted from one found in Vegetius' book on Roman military strategy, De Re Militari (circa 450 AD), the only complete work on the topic to survive to the modern era. The phrase translated literally reads, "Therefore let him who desires peace prepare for war."

Whether that is good advice seems less relevant than whether those who prepare for war actually desire peace. I am thinking of something Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, said to Colin Powell, the then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to wit: "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

Which brings us to today: a world decidedly more under the sway of Albright than Vegetius, a world in which everyone seems to be preparing for war, but with little intention of preserving the peace.

Taking a holiday break - no post this week

I am taking a holiday break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, September 7.

Dog days in D.C.

As a child I believed that the so-called Dog Days of summer were called that because the intense heat causes dogs to pant more than usual to keep their body temperature down. And while my observation was not entirely misguided, I found out later that the appellation comes from the approximately six-week period when the rising of the sky's brightest star, Sirius—the so-called Dog Star associated with the constellation Canis Major, the "greater dog"—occurs before the Sun, making it visible to observers in the Northern Hemisphere.

The modern starting date is usually said to be July 3, and the ending date is August 11—though most people think of the Dog Days as extending into late August or even early September since they associate this period with exceptionally hot, humid weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

It was in preparation for such days that during my first summer in the District of Columbia, my landlady instructed her handyman to install an air conditioner in the window of the room I rent in a cavernous home in northwest Washington. She insisted that I would never make it through a hot, humid D.C. summer without air conditioning. I told her that I was pretty heatproof and that I would make it just fine. After all, I grew up in Michigan and managed the hot, humid summers there without air conditioning.

Two presidents, dementia and the 25th amendment

A friend of mine, who many years ago used to be a nurse caring for dementia patients, has impressed a very important point on me in recent months: Dementia just keeps getting worse. It never gets better.

It seems the United States has now had two presidents in a row around whom stories of diminished capacity and dementia have proliferated. Recently, a contributor to The Hill wrote about President Donald Trump's confabulation regarding his uncle John Trump, long deceased and formerly a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Now it's important to know the meaning of confabulation to understand this anecdote, so here's the dictionary definition:  "the replacement of a gap in a person's memory by a falsification that they believe to be true." The author of the piece in The Hill believes Trump was simply relating something Trump believed to be true from his direct experience.