Author: publius

To understand what this show is about, and for recordings of the shows from 2021, go here. 2022 shows are here, 2023 shows are here, and 2024 shows are here.

• 2025–01–04 We humans, time–binding animals that we are, have now exhausted the first quarter of the twenty–first century. And what do we have to show for it? Colonies on the Moon, research outposts on Mars, expeditions to the asteroids and Jupiter? Peace, prosperity, and healthy ecosystems on Earth? Make better choices, children!
• 2025–01–11 The metaphenomenon of recurrent phenomena occupies a considerable part of my attention this week. Also, a recommendation for a book, The Flying Sorcerers by Gerrold and Niven ; a consideration of the Car Culture in America ; and a warning to be aware of the ape brain that lies between the lizard brain and the higher faculties of consciousness.
• 2025–01–18 Has the capitalist owner–class, like its mediaeval equivalent (albeit with far less tangible reason), embraced the delusion that it represents a higher order of life than the working class? Will the USA, as a result, see a wave of CEO shootings in the coming year? Are our measures of historical time obsolete in the face of increased human life expectancy? Also, a little bit of astronomy, a little bit of space travel, and Mail Call! Two postcards from Canada this week, and a letter from Australia.
• 2025–01–25 The present world situation, it is clear, is unsatisfactory — although hopeful signs are there to be seen for those who will but look. But why are those who have it all the most unsatisfied? Also, mixed news from Canada, stupid news from Chile, and even stupider, colossally stupid, news from Britain ; new additions to our archive of scanned nuclear–energy public–information materials ; and if you’re going to be in the Dallas area 14—16 February, come up and see us at FenCon.
• 2025–02–01 Starting very late, about 15 minutes in as a matter of fact. I share some sensitive personal information about my family and friends, which is always a mistake, and lay out my expectations for the coming month, explaining why I may not be available to do shows regularly.
• 2025–03–15 Beware the Ides of March! I’m not yet back to doing a full show yet, but please accept these few minutes of commentary about geopolitics, the latest semi–successful lunar landing mission, my dental well–being, and the potential of “generative AI” to provide an always–on, personalized cult leader for anybody who is even remotely, momentarily susceptible. Exciting times we live in, to be sure!
• 2025–03–22 Can the lack of classical education be blamed for the failure of democracy, in the Soviet Union or elsewhere? Probably not, but it’s a nice thought all the same. Also, more Dental Drama™ ; a coda to last week’s show ; local outreach; and I offer a new approach to nuclear energy for the new German government, with a new slogan : “Pro–Nuclear is Pro–Europe”.
• 2025–03–29 Support your local library! No solar eclipse for me — such a travesty. Family emergency, an earlier return to the USA than planned, and anxiety about when I may be able to leave again ; effects of weather on my outreach efforts ; reflections on the limits of “ephemeralization” ; a discussion of the rise of the anti–nuclear movement, and some text I am going to have to use again.
• 2025–04–05 Anxiety about my upcoming return to the USA basically de–railed this show. I didn’t get to the things I was more interested in talking about, such as a recently–announced “nuclear battery”, because I felt the need to explain why the sudden imposition of large import duties can have a seriously damaging effect on a national economy, and even on the world economy in case of cascading retaliation. But I did manage to carve out some time to criticize the German educational system, and offer a critique of schooling generally.
• 2025–04–12 Yuri’s Night! Find your local party. Mail Call! The significance of the prospective new power reactor at the University of Illinois. And more thoughts about industrial policy, world trade, and the old adage “it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the sudden stop at the end”.
• 2025–04–19 Stardrive! When will we get it, and how? Perspectives on a “nuclear battery” and an “all–woman spaceflight” ; a little more about tariff and non–tariff trade barriers and their utility, the adage “de minimis non curat lex”, and the straw–man of the “US–made iPhone” ; and likely–final remarks on the gold standard.
• 2025–04–26 You can’t apply technological solutions to social problems — has there ever been a statement so widely and sententiously repeated, and so blatantly false? Also, the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster ; the world mourns a high–school teacher from Argentina ; progress toward blast №3 ; more on “nuclear batteries” ; and I talk a little about currency reforms.
• 2025–05–03 Power outrage! in Iberia, and the Spanish Prime Minister runs his mouth off in a fashion which shows a disturbing degree of ignorance — and another in Pittsburgh, where the cause is a great deal more obvious. Also, more work on blast, and my advice for Mark Carney.
• 2025–05–10 More public outreach — the Friends of the Haltom City Public Library annual Book Sale and Flea–for–All may seem an odd place to talk to people about atomic power, but you have to go where the people are. Also a quick calculation that Comanche Peak 1&2 have generated as much power since they came into service as 3700 large wind turbines in their whole working lives ; the new Pope and his priorities, with a quote from the famous encyclical letter of Leo XIII, On the Condition of the Working Classes ; and a scathing editorial from a Spanish grid executive and renewables proponent, explaining that the big blackout should not have come to a surprise, because integrating wind and solar into the grid is more expensive and difficult than the Spanish Government has been willing to face, and also pointing out that shutting down nuclear power is not compatible with reducing CO₂ emissions.
• 2025–05–24 Looking realistically at the present world situation may not be good for one’s health. It certainly isn’t popular. I give a bit of an after–action report from last week, and try to contrast the Canadian (CNSC) and US (NRC) systems of nuclear–energy regulation. Neither is as good as it could be, but the CNSC model probably works better in practice. And I suggest that the Law of Unintended Consequences may be expected, occasionally, to produce unintended benefits.
• 2025–05–31 No matter how many times I say it, it remains true : international air travel is for the birds! But at least the 6 line of the Munich subway is back in operation. Also I once again criticize the mindset that “nobody ever changed the world working 40 hours a week” — design and engineering decisions made by overworked people in understaffed offices are likely to be bad, or at best, less than good.
• 2025–06–07 Brighton is in Britain (Blighty if you’re feeling mean), and this weekend, so am I. In this pre–recorded message, I invite you to consider the question of whether, from the viewpoint of Sir Thomas More, we may not already be living in the post–Singularity, trans–human future. Certainly the conditions of human life have been fundamentally altered since his day!
• 2025–06–14 Once more with feeling — the people on this planet are crazy! And in that context, I discuss possible next steps, mine (which definitely involve one of which will be Archipelacon, and may involve turning blast into a newspaper, but I also can’t rule out a panicked trans–Atlantic flight) and other people’s. Also some very welcome news from Great Britain, ridiculously beyond any reasonable time–frame for it, but welcome.
• 2025–06–21 Solstice! And a lovely sunny one here in Munich, just as it ought to be. That sunniness, however, doesn’t make paving over vast tracts of land with photovoltaics any more appealing. I suggest that the European Union could be quite a bit more ambitious with their targets for nuclear energy production, and explain things I’ve been doing to get ready for Archipelacon. Owing to some technical problem, while live listeners heard the whole show, the archive cuts off during my discussion of a so–called granola advertising “100% real food ingredients and no grain fillers”, which I would say makes it more like a trail mix — containing, of course, no peanuts.

Supplementary Shows

• 2025–01–03 “The domain of the virus is apparently the threshold between what we have known in the past as the animate and the inanimate.” Back to Bucky Fuller and Utopia or Oblivion — The Prospects for Humanity, which seems very appropriate as we begin this Glorious Future Year of 2025.
• 2025–01–07 “When we have something vital to say we can usually develop the means of communication. Today with our great vocabulary inheritance we squander meanings on unworthy causes and communicate little that needs to be said.” More of Utopia or Oblivion by Bucky Fuller, the tail end of Prevailing Conditions in the Arts, and the start of Keynote Address at Vision 65.
• 2025–01–10 “We find that man is developing an increasing confidence in the way in which computers are resolving heretofore vexing and seemingly unsolvable problems.” Completion of Keynote Address at Vision 65, and beginning of Summary Address at Vision 65.
• 2025–01–14 “There is now a very large inventory of ways in which Man has been teaching, thinking, and accounting events and values which have no experimentally–demonstrated validity.” The remainder of Summary Address at Vision 65 just rounds out the hour (hey, it had to happen sometime), and provides the title for the book, Utopia or Oblivion.
• 2024–01–17 “For every problem solved a plurality of new problems arise to take their place. But the problems need not be those of physical and economic survival.” More from Fuller, a short piece titled The World Game — How to Make the World Work, describing a very interesting computer simulation effort, and the beginning of a longer piece entitled Geosocial Revolution.
• 2025–01–21 “The fundamental and prior problem of Man’s surviving successfully on this little sun–orbiting spaceship, ‘Earth’, cannot be solved by political theory and is not to be left to the politician’s ultimate lever — war — hot, subversive, cold, or cool.” More of Geosocial Revolution from Utopia or Oblivion by R Buckminster Fuller.
• 2025–01–28 “With these interlinkages of the lever and channeled energy, Man is now in the wealth–making business, which is to use his brain to get nature’s vast energy patterns to do the energy work of supporting and regenerating him.” More from Geosocial Revolution in Utopia or Oblivion.
• 2025–03–18 “Quite clearly, Man is coming into a completely new ecological relationship to his Earth, and quite clearly, we are accelerating into an entirely new relationship of Man to Universe. In speaking to you I have to take that statement as my fundamental premise, not just as an interesting aside. The problems of our moment are as unprecedented as they are vast. The solutions will have to be unprecedented and vast.” Picking up again with Utopia or Oblivion by Fuller, we finish “Geosocial Revolution” and begin “How to Maintain Man as a Success in Universe”.
• 2025–04–15 “Anyone can use the telephone. Any two can have any kind of telephone conversation they want. They can call themselves communist, capitalist, or any other kind of name. The telephone works for either. But the telephone shrinks the world for both, and disasters can be averted by means of it, and when disasters occur it brings swift help from great distances.” More from Utopia or Oblivion, continuing with How to Maintain Man as a Success in Universe.
• 2025–04–18 “The men and women who work on television get and hold their jobs through their diction, good vocabularies, confident tone, and pleasing personalities.” The conclusion of How to Maintain Man as a Success in Universe.
• 2025–04–22 “Evolution is not confined to the organic man, but consists of the combined man and his environment.” The title piece from Utopia or Oblivion (1969) by R Buckminster Fuller. Also a recommendation for another book, Carry On, Mister Bowditch (1955) by Jean Lee Latham.
• 2025–04–25 “Either war is obsolete, or Man is.” Conclusion of Utopia or Oblivion, but not of Utopia or Oblivion. Fuller discusses the reasons for failure of past forms of utopianism, and the radical differences in circumstances today.
• 2025–04–29 “Because man’s legs are so short and the planet Earth so big and because the few areas around it where he could find immediate vital support in his early days on the planet amounted locally to less than 5% of the Earth’s surface, Man has mistakenly identified himself during the past eight millenniums with the rooted vegetation rather than with the mobile vertebrates of which type he is a member.” Continuing with Utopia or Oblivion, we have the whole of Curricula and the Design Initiative, and a first part of Design Strategy.
• 2025–05–06 “Minmaxfamfax” is a clue that we are continuing with Design Strategy from Utopia or Oblivion. Also there is a thunderstorm going on in the background.
• 2025–05–09 “California is the center of the outermost jumpoff pad of humanity’s springboard.” Concept 14, World Community and Subcommunities of World Man, means we have almost reached the end of Design Strategy, and with it, of Utopia or Oblivion. We will probably finish the book Tuesday.
• 2025–05–13 “So ignorantly, myopically, and statically conceived and so obsolete is the whole housing art that its death led the Crash of 1929, since when its ghost script has been kept in rehearsal by US government subsidy at a total underwriting cost to date of $200 billion.” Finishing up Design Strategy, and moving on to the epilogue of Utopia or Oblivion. (Minor glitch at the beginning.)
• 2025–05–16 “In this way we discover that the buildings, which controlled energy conditions of heat, cold, dry, and wet, were in effect machines because machines process and control energy. Because we are conditioned to think of the house as static, we fail to realize that the automobile is as much a part of the house as is the addition of a woodshed.” And with that, we complete our reading of Utopia or Oblivion : The Prospects for Humanity (1969) by R Buckminster Fuller.
• 2025–05–20 PWRSD 1976 : A Snapshot in Time is a kind of yearbook from the nuclear power operation at Westinghouse. There is some fascinating material in it, including a description of an absolutely hair–raising bit of messing around with uranium in a metallurgical laboratory (not the Metallurgical Laboratory). Unfortunately, although the printing job is professional–looking, something awful seems to have happened in the galley stage, as more than once entire lines of text have disappeared.
• 2025–05–23 Something of a mess, as I continue to read from A Snapshot in Time, but much of what I’m trying to read is tabular material.
• 2025–05–30 More of A Snapshot in Time, largely a description of the Pressurized Water Reactor Nuclear Steam Supply System, interlarded with extensive explanations from me.
• 2025–06–03 More from A Snapshot in Time, mostly an extended description of the corporate structure of Westinghouse PWRSD. Next time we will get to some more interesting material!
• 2025–06–13 I finish up A Snapshot in Time with a brief but interesting section entitled Future, a series of questions and answers about nuclear power safety (meant to educate the public into acceptance, which may not actually work all that well), and some brief biographies of senior Westinghouse personnel. There is a glitch halfway through, owing entirely to my error and ill–preparedness.