The CCP's Olympic Backsliding

We Need To Discuss This China Economic News

In the 1980s I read that the USSR's rate of capital investment was growing yearly and way higher than in the USA, and I thought "Uh-oh for us." Then I read that all that capital investment was producing a negative return -- that they weren't just running on a treadmill to get ahead, but running on a treadmill and falling behind -- and I thought "Uh-oh for them." As regards Communist China, have we transitioned from the "Uh-Oh for us" stage and into "Uh-Oh for them?"

The Chinese leadership blamed political reform in the USSR for the collapse of the communist regime and vowed not to make that mistake. This is like blaming the cancer on the desperate remedies used to slow its spread. Now they've tossed that politically convenient "two systems" pledge (allowing limited political and economic freedom) onto the Ashheap of Chinese History. What desperate measures will Xi Jinping use to avoid that same fate?

I Improve "Rebel Moon -- Part One"

I watched Rebel Moon on Netflix. I kept my expectations quite low and the show met them.

I thought the girl working the fields under the pinkish light reflecting off the huge planet was both cool and, at the same time, kinda hot. Then I wondered if her moon was tidally locked to that huge planet like our moon is to Earth and if that huge planet blocked the sun for half of the moon's orbit. Then I stopped thinking, which helped.

The girl lives with a bunch of Viking farmers who are pining for the fjords. She is with them but not of them. A Nazi guy shows up in a big, planet-killing ship and gives the Vikings what for. It seems the Vikings have turned Amish and stubbornly refuse to buy mechanical harvesters that will ruin their close-to-god lifestyle but produce more food for their conquerors.

I'm confused about the Nazis because the soldiers left behind are Australian. One of them says, "Throw another steak on the barbie, mate, while I rape the kind-hearted hot blondie carrying the water bucket." I think the blond girl they try to rape is that same special, life-affirming princess so often discussed. I say this because the female fieldhand-ninja that came to her rescue was the bodyguard of the Princess before that terrible thing that happened...happened. So wouldn't they both crash in that same spaceship? Oh, right, apparently there was a crashed spaceship. Questions remain: Was Anthony Hopkins voicing the pacifist robot who's in deep-like with the blond girl? Was that child-stealing spider-lady actually a misunderstood person or an understood giant spider?

One thing I like about this universe is that the neighboring planets are so close you can walk between them. OK, they do find a charming smuggler with a spaceship to eliminate some of the hiking. The plot is "The Magnificent Seven Space Samurai" meet "The Empire as it Strikes Back." The guy playing the gruff "Charles Bronson" part is a griffin whisperer, so he has a bit of the suave Robert Redford in him.

Robert Redford played the horse whisperer in The Horse Whisperer. He helped a lame Scarlett Johansen's horse. Scarlett's character really was lame -- though not a lesbian, near as I could tell. The horse wasn't doing too good, either. Scarlett and her horse got hit by a truck. I was dragged off to see this movie and I thought it was "The Hoarse Whisperer," which made sense because if you are hoarse, you are going to whisper. So at the beginning, I'd ask, "Who's hoarse?" And she'd say, "It's the girl's horse." And I'd say, "Sure, but who's hoarse!" and she'd say, "Stop it!"

Where was I? Right. I thought the griffin should have flown upside down to ditch the whisperer, done in slo-mo, of course. The movie needs mo' slo-mo. And mo'cowbell in the musical score.

I did enjoy the climactic but ridiculous fight scene on the "floating drydock" above the clouds. The female fieldhand-ninja gets to meet, and temporarily defeat, her Nazi Nemesis -- who must have tucked and rolled after that long, hard fall.

I got a bit of a quibble. Earlier in the show, when she was at the campfire with the Viking Amish Farmer fella, she could explain that she was graciously adopted by a powerful evil commander after he made her an orphan. He did painful experiments on her. You always hurt the one you love was his favorite saying. She could tell the Amish Viking, "Small as I seem, I'm not just much stronger and meaner than you -- I weigh a lot more."

Then he looks at her quizzically and she explains, "I'm dense. I'm 87.6 percent Unobtainium, which is why I'm so light on my feet and yet rugged. Try to break my arm. Oh, go ahead, try to break it. You can't. Even my wounds heal quickly on account of all those tiny blood-bots that repair everything. Sometimes those blood-bots take over and make me do terrible things -- but not so much lately!"

Then she'd stare off into the distance and we'd cut to the flashback, "We found the Unobtainium on a lovely, lush planet where we met these beautiful and charming blue people and killed them. My evil stepdad established mines there which operate in harsh conditions but do provide employment for millions of slaves. My stepdad says it's the last job they'll ever need. He's funny, sometimes, and loves animals and prepubescent boys. I have enough highly refined Unobtainium in me to power the entire imperial fleet for five years -- that's why I'm a much sought-after commodity. Melt me -- which won't be easy cause I don't want to be melted -- and I'm high-grade fuel. Yeah, I'm denser than normal but also a wonderful dancer. Wanna dance? No? I'm good on the farm, too. I don't need no thick-headed stallion to pull that plow. I'll do it myself."  

In this way, she could explain her immense Physical Prowess, and how she keeps beating up all those guys.

There is a rumored Part Two. Am I right about that Extra-Special Life-affirming Princess being the water-carrying farm girl? Are the Amish Viking Villagers actually the Seven Dwarves? Stay-tunned.

COP-Out China

 COP28 Climate Change Conference

They're throwing another Climate Change feast somewhere and the number 28 means there were 27 previous party-hardies for the Climate Control Crowd. Peter Zeihan provides a short summation of what is going on. Apparently China, often held up as a model, is in "count me out" mode on the latest proposal.

Zeihan makes a point similar to the one I've been making for decades: CO2 is like "the little gas that could" in the global warming catastrophe scenario.  It works on a narrow spectrum of sunlight and is quite potent when first introduced but soon approaches its "upper limit" when it comes to greenhouse warming. At this point, its additional effects are rather small (water vapor is more powerful and when will they do something about the rain?). To get its assigned Civilization-destroying job done, CO2 needs a lot of help. This comes in the form of "feedback loops."

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.  There is a lot of methane hydrate at the bottom of the ocean, where the pressure and the cold keep it trapped.  Warm the Oceans and this methane is released, leading to a runaway greenhouse effect and a potential mass extinction event.  This is the "feedback loop" that all the other "feedback loops" lead to.

There is a problem though. Methane breaks down rapidly in the atmosphere and in a few years much of it is gone and in ten years all of it. So it can't be a slow, steady release of methane, it has to happen quickly to produce the kind of effects that will make fearful populations willing to pay more taxes, higher more bureaucrats and submit to more control. Not Enough Government seems to be the real crisis all these Climate COPs are addressing.

A Stroke and a Quibble

 Revolutionary 1 Stroke engine Analyzed

The notion of a one-stroke engine intrigued me. I imagined a one-time, one "power-stroke" engine (think bomb).

Well, it's a two-stroke engine with two opposing pistons. You could argue that 2 pistons in one cylinder sharing two strokes equals one stroke (you can, but I won't). The video explains how it all works -- even as clickbait.

The engine involves revolutions, but it's not actually revolutionary. In my youth, one of my many strokes of genius was about "two pistons sharing one cylinder." I graciously provided the basic (quite basic) design to a motor-head friend, who told me, "It's been done!"  I was pleased to discover there were other geniuses at work in the world.

The design has weaknesses (low torque at take-off), so you won't find it under your hood. After 30 seconds of consideration, I came up with a possible application. When used in an electric hybrid automobile, the engine could run at its most efficient rpm to turn the generator that charges a battery pack while an electric motor turns the wheels. Meanwhile, the engine's lightweight and compact design would provide an advantage.

Got Ham?

When you get right down to it, Gotham and Metropolis are the same place -- a setting for superheroes with an unsettling resemblance to New York City on a really bad day.  Gotham is a nickname for NYC, first applied to the future Metropolis at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century by Washington Irving (Of Sleepy Hollow and the "Headless Horseman" fame). It wasn't meant as a flattering appellation -- it means "Goat Town" (not GOAT town) -- but caught on nonetheless. After decades of hypergrowth, the five boroughs were merged into a great big Metropolis at the end of the century.

I recently watched Zack Snyders treatment of Batman and Superman, where Gotham plays Newark to NYC's Metropolis. The two movies -- Batman V. Superman (Ultimate Edition) and Zack Snyder's Justice League -- are available on Max and are quite long. They took about a week to watch, although I did take some breaks for sleep and such.

I thought bringing the two cities together worked about as well as bringing Batman and Superman together -- by which I mean not well. Batman is a regular man (an especially good one) who battles regular human criminals (the especially bad ones -- who may have been goosed with this or that toxic juice). Toss him at high velocity against reinforced concrete and he's done, no matter how good his armor is. In the fight scenes with Superman, that happened quite a lot, though the Supe' fought with a kryptonite handicap. In the end, they became friends and took on a big -- I don't know what the hell it was, but it was big -- something or other. Wonder Woman shows up to help. "I thought she was with you," was the best line in the movie.

Not to ruin it (I don't think it will), but Superman dies at the end of the first movie and comes back to life halfway through the second. I thought it was another bad choice. It's ridiculously hard to kill the guy and when it happens it should mean something. Of course, I knew it couldn't last since he was going to be in the second movie. 

Originally, Gotham was a metropolis in its own right, with its High Society, uber-wealthy, and widespread corruption. It got downgraded into a depressed, hollowed-out, post-industrial has been. Its character changed, and so did Batman, who became less of a detective and more of a Gatling gun.

The Justice League was so long that towards the end I began rooting for the Vile Henchman and his Flying Monkey minions (an homage, I presume, to a much better film, The Wizard of Oz). Quite simply, I wanted planet Earth to be put out of its misery -- and the rest of the multiverse with it (talk about high stakes). Then there is the small matter of the epilogue. A couple of minutes to round things up wouldn't do.  Instead, we launched into another bizarre movie, and a very confusing one -- except it turned out to be a bad dream, a Batman bad dream.

By this time I zoned out and the credits began to roll, backed by a soft piano instead of a mighty orchestra. I reached to turn it off but stopped. I wondered: Is that Hallelujah? I hadn't heard the Leonard Cohen song in a few decades and the piano piece was more of an improv. But a few minutes into it the Lady sang:

I've heard there was a secret chord

That David played, and it pleased the Lord,

But you don't really care for music, do you?

Well, it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth

The minor fall, the major lift

The baffled king composing Hallelujah

And so on. I don't know what that song had to do with that movie, but it was the best part.

Allison Crowe - Hallelujah

And some bonus Superhero introspection:

Superman's Song

Invention Prevention

When I was a boy watching WWII submarine dramas, I came up with the idea for a submarine that pushed itself forward by taking in water at the front and pumping it from the rear. In a stroke of genius, I decided to use the water coming in the front of the sub to turn the turbines that would power the pumps that pushed the water out the back. Sure, it would need a bit of a push to get going, but after that you're good.

I got really excited about the idea because I thought it might have applications in the cold war. I told my father so he could maybe call President Eisenhower. My dad said I had just invented a “perpetual motion” machine. Upon hearing this I swelled with pride. I said, "Gosh, golly, gee! I have barely achieved the age of reason and already I've invented a perpetual motion machine! How awesome is that! I'm like the Mozart – whoever that is – of Machine Inventors."

Then my father explained the scientific consensus of the day (thank god that’s changed). There I was, not yet a youth, and I came face to face with my own logical fallacy -- not someone else's, mind you (this happens quite a lot) but my own. Back then we didn't protect our children from such events.

The fact that physics could interfere with a rich fantasy life kinda turned me off on that whole course of study (I should have gone into central banking, where making something from nothing is central to the entire process).