Hyperloop Lie From Ukraine Enabler

Elon Musk proposed to send people in evacuated tubes at more than the speed of sound. The idea is not new… it was proposed for Switzerland long ago… And it was used in pneumatic systems all over major cities, a century ago. Strictly speaking the accelerations would be unbearable, and Musk obviously knows this, so, as it exactly stands, the idea is a lie.

Already 40 years ago, French high speed trains could induce nausea for the reason of acceleration as they crossed gentle mountain ranges such as the hills of the Morvan. They now go at 350km/h. If the speed of an object around a curve of radius R is V, the acceleration goes according to VV/R

In Europe 400km/h very high speed lines come with vertical radius of rises of 56 kilometers (35 miles). Such is the case of (under construction) High Speed 2 in the UK, At three times the speed, that is, the speed of sound, the radius would be above 500 kilometers (as the square of 3  is 9…) In other words, Hyperloop as proposed would have to tunnel from San Francisco to LA, all the way… A strange experience at great cost necessitating a minimum of three tunnels, with the maintenance tunnel, etc…

Thus the natural domain of hyperloop would rather be subway systems… But then people want to be able to come in and out… Etc. But then again, accelerations would be unbearable if speeds were much higher than present systems… Plus air would come in…

The reason for evacuated tubes, or fast planes flying high, is to reduce air resistance. At 11 kilometers high, flight level 360, air pressure is a fourth of that at sea level. But there are other methods to reduce air resistance, including forward spikes used by French and US sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles… This is an active field of study, to reduce the shockwaves of supersonic jets…

Could evacuated tubes still be used for merchandise, say between the port of LA and Las Vegas? Of course…

New style TGV reduces aerodynamic drag by 20% relative to preceding versions (red thing behind is an original TGV from 1980). A deployable spike in front may do better…

Musk is a great engineer, and inspirational. But he is also a great businessman: both Tesla and SpaceX have leveraged government financing… Perhaps the best thing Obama did… Here it is, from six years ago:

“Tesla, the poster concept of present-day American mercantilism. It is flooding the world with luxury electric car of dubious ecological merit. All the way to Norway, huge government subsidies are piled up on it (and I would be very interested to know the details on the mortgages and conferences various officials involve take). Thanks to well-organized propaganda and financing by the US government. In truth, Tesla and the other companies of Elon Musk (Solar City, Space X) are companies massively financed by the US governments“

Now SpaceX provides with (not enough!) secure links for the Ukrainian military, which has serious communication problems…New York Times in “On Front Lines, Communication Breakdowns Prove Costly for Ukraine. The Ukrainian Army has tried to modernize, but still falls short in coordination among units, so they often fight independently of one another — with sometimes deadly results.”…

The General faced similar issues during the defense of Sievierodonetsk when his platoon was on the front line near a small river. On the opposite bank was another platoon with which he had no way to communicate. So almost every time the enemy attacked, the other unit would not just shoot at the Russians but also, unknowingly, at the General’s men who were in the line of fire — with everything from rifles to heavy machine guns.

“Nobody knew how to connect with them,” the General said. “Every day as we were standing there, for over 20 days, as far as I understood, nobody could connect to that unit next to us and let them know they were firing on their own.”

Ukraine needs plenty of Musk wares. “Soldiers say the most reliable equipment they’ve received, though in small quantities, has been Starlink satellite internet, enabled by a small square-like antenna that can be connected to act much like any Wi-Fi network.” High output encrypted US military radios’ locations get detected by the Orcs (who are busy destroying just arrived US howitzers, and their crews; so far the French CAESAR guns, which are highly mobile, shoot and scoop, have escaped lethal battery counterfire, but there are not enough of them…).

The tech supremacy successfully achieved by business men is not to be frown on: tech supremacy is how civilization is saved, and progresses, time and time again…

So Musk knows what Musk is up to with Hyperloop… besides gathering money from gullible investors… But it’s hyperloop is not for transporting people.

Patrice Ayme

RAGFLATION: Inflating Poor In Rags, Wealthiest, Wealthier

RAGFLATION: A New Concept, Inflating Money And Rags: Let Them Wear Rags!

Markets expect inflation to subside within a year (there are markets of future interest rates). Central banks need to mitigate inflation. However, central banks must not create a recession. Yet, the Fed head claimed action which risked a recession was needed. For those who don’t know, central banks are cover-ups of unions of the wealthiest lending to states… So they are intrinsically plots of the wealthiest. The earliest ones in Florence and Britain, were devised for, and entailed much military action.

Thus, any central banks’ action is one directed by the wealthiest financiers plotting together in the name of the wealthiest crust of society. By yanking interest rates and loans (to the wealthiest) just so, and according to their latest plot, they can insure that the wealthiest get wealthier and the poorest more into rags. 

Correcting an error such as free money for the wealthiest, with another error, expensive money for the poor (after making the wealthiest wealthier) does not make a right… for society at large… although it makes still another right for the wealthiest.

The present day inflation was created by central banks, principally (complicating factors such as Putin’s Third World War made matters worse). The Fed not only annihilated interest rates and made massive qualitative easing, but also bought mortgage bonds to make mortgages loans dirty cheap, thus feeding a strong inflation in housing… In existing housing prices, not in creating new housing (the two concepts are antinomic to each other)… making the housing crisis worse.

This sort of torture through interest rates is called “sadomonetarism”, since Lady Thatcher, who practiced it. It inflicts pain to better society (supposedly).

Sadomasochism is fed by a deep tendency of the human mind… that of inflicting pain and extinction on other human beings. This instinct corresponds to the necessity of destroying other humans to save the ecology. In other words, lofty reasoning from revered experts may well hide the basest and worst instincts of destruction… which are millions of years old. When the chimps go kill all chimps in the nearest valley, they don’t act any differently.

Thus, the Fed, the central bank, which is stuffed with human beings with higher ambition, greater greed for domination than usual, as all the most powerful institutions tend to be, may well harbor, deep down inside, a strong desire for ragflation…. The will to reduce a significant part of the population to rags. To make the wealthy wealthier.

In the ultra wealthy San Francisco Bay Area, where I reside, one can see camps, some extending a mile along some freeways and interchanges, where people, some dramatically sick, live in rags. That, too, is part of the economy, and should be part of the Fed’s business, this ragflation, this inflation of rags and destitution, that the Fed fed, while ensuring that local homeowners enjoy multimillion dollar homes (even if they have just one bathroom) lowers the standard of civilization. It makes people inured to gross inequality, inequity and sadomasochism.

Sadomonetarism, making the wealthiest wealthier, is just one consequence of this generalized desire to inflict pain on others. Enablement, love and consideration for genocidal dictators such as Putin and Xi is another aspect, so is the devilish plot to support irrealistic “renewables” while nuking nuclear all with the practical effect of fostering fossil fuels.

The most effective manipulation of minds consists into doing something in order to achieve the opposite. 

Patrice Ayme

This is just a fractious of the Woodstreet Oakland Concentration Camp. In the distance, homes on the hills ar worth several million dollars each. Such camps are many in Oakland, and typically tucked along or below ten lane wide massive freeways or freeway interchanges with dozens of lanes..

Judiciary Must Not Legislate: Pass An Abortion Law In The USA. Roe v Wade Was A Masquerade

It is not for the judiciary to legislate. The judiciary is in charge of implementing and adjudicating the laws. Laws are passed by the legislature (supposedly representing “We The People”).

In the US, the Supreme Court stepped in, and nine senior men with a mostly Caucasian appearance, 50 years ago, passed a judicial opinion masquerading as a sort of law enabling some sorts of abortions. 

This is not how  representative democracy with separation of three powers is supposed to work. This violation of basic constitutionality set a dangerous precedent where the Supreme Court displaced Congress to write sort-of-laws. 

Since then, one can see the mood of replacing laws voted, or not voted, by legislators being created, or overruled by the judiciary in other domains, for example guns… With disastrous effect; it should not be SCOTUS which decides what sot of guns people can carry. 

Far from promoting democracy, legislating through diktats of the judiciary is not just unconstitutional, it’s demeaning, infuriating, it makes people turn away from the law and it creates a general fascist mood, as We The People gets in the habits to have a committee of nine decided what is legal, or not… Instead of having more than 500 representatives decide. 

Worldwide, more than 50 representative democracies have passed laws on abortions, using a standard vote in the Parliament. Those laws are remarkably similar. One could call them collectively, the abortion law: abortion at will, no question asked until 12 to 14 weeks, after that, medical opinions, and restrictions, steer abortions (including by considering the psychological state of the mother). The idea being that, once the fetus is viable, it’s not the private property of the carrier of said yet-to-be-born baby, 

The US must do the same on a national level… And there will be no problem. In these 50+ democracies which passed the abortion law, abortion is not controversial (anymore). 

One of the reasons that the Judiciary must not legislate is that it is very bad at it (having others things to do, and other inclinations).

In its abortion decision, of 1972, SCOTUS confused unanimously… life and privacy. Certainly the privacy of someone stops where the life of someone else starts.  Just as the motion of one’s fist must stop where someone else’s nose starts…

Romans used to have the right to kill their child, no question asked. Now, thoughtful laws prevent them to do so. That’s progress. All culturally advanced countries have an abortion law (details do not vary much among US peers). Why can’t the US pass one? Too busy being tribal?

Patrice Ayme

Supreme Court Of US (“SCOTUS”) in 1972. Those 9 mostly white oldish men decided that abortion was a right to privacy, and exceptionally stupid decision… Which led millions into error regrading human life: somebody’s life is not somebody’s else, “right to privacy”.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the six SCOTUS judges of the majority, said that a Mississipi law was OK, and that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that affirmed Roe’s core holding, should be overruled.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Alito wrote. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

DREAMING AS META THINKING, Creating, Jumbling And, Or, Inverting Causation

FROM JUMBLING DREAM LIKE FANTASIES, HARD CORE REALITY LOGIC ARISES

Before we have really new logic, we often have a dream.

Dreaming can be so detailed it becomes a world with its smells, sounds, locales, individuals, situations etc. Typically they are a patchwork of what was encountered prior. For example I just had a dream where the main activities happened in a place which had the characteristics of two lodged in the Sierra Nevada I was at in the last two decades. They are located 200 kilometers and 4 hour of driving away from each other; one is characterized by many separated buildings and that feature was kept; the other is more panoramic, with fewer trees is that feature was kept. The ensemble was located by the dream machine in a climbing area I used to climb a lot at, more than two decades ago. That area is completely protected, in a park, and enjoys a magnificent panorama above a large lake, far below, and the panorama, north of lake Tahoe, extends 50 kilometers. So three distinct geographical elements, hundreds of miles and experienced decades apart, were mixed and matched in an harmonious whole. And then the intrigue enfolded, involving some significant others, in enlightening new circunstances… And out of this some strong latent emotion emerged… A new element of subconscious, not that much sub, actually… because it’s not exactly the first time it shows up: dreams can reappear…. 

***

Elements of (what seems to be) reality is all we have [1;consider Plato]. What the brain can do is to combine them, and order them, according to causality. But causality is often deduced from correlation, and the causation can well go the other way. An obvious example is that the sun turns around the sky, at first sight, when in reality it’s actually the sky which turns around. 

At some point, an ancient astronomer had a dream that the sun was far away, and it was the Earth which was moving below his/her feet. To do this, the Earth, which looked enormous, had to be made smaller than the sun, which looked small. 

Reality builds neural networks in our minds. Consciousness manages them according to the practice of daily necessity. Thus our perception of daily reality is captured by pragmatism. But this daily practice lives in a much bigger context, namely what is really going on.

A standard flaw is to inverse cause and effect. This inversion is often used in war: X starts by attacking Y, typically because X is stronger than Y. Then Y, being weaker, defends itself more ferociously, in the hope of extracting a higher price in horror to X. Then X accuses Y of being hateful savages… justifying the war that they launched, retrospectively.  

***

For example, English speaking European colonists in America held for centuries that  Native Americans were savages who killed European colonizers cruelly, so hating those “Indians” was the epitome of morality…. Not false, right, but wrong in a larger context. 

Indeed, in reality, Europeans came to America, and killed Americans to start with. Or more exactly… we know this from the French Jacque Cartier, circa 1530s… Europeans came to America and were told very reasonably by the inhabitants of Canada that there was no room for them the continent was full. It took generations for the French to show to the Americans that more intensive agriculture freed room for everybody. When the French, led by Champlain, around 1600s made a detailed exploration of what would come to be called “New England”, they arrived to the same conclusion: not enough room for French colonization, the land was fully occupied by Americans.

However, pandemics struck the Americans within a few years. Then the calculated brutality, racism and militarization of the Venture Capitalism of the “West Country Men” establishing Virginia, which aimed at exterminating the Americans, caused a war, a war of extermination… naturally enough, the resulting savagery, although real, was attributed to the Americans when in truth it originated with English capitalist conquest…. 

That causal inversion made it possible for the colonists to hate until they exterminated the Americans… as was intended all along by the English plutocrats for the very practical reason of stealing America from its inhabitants. This cruel inversion made morally, thus physically possible the world’s greatest empire… as the US is the progeny of Europe’s two faced medieval super power, Franco-Britannia; now Euro-American power is overwhelming as the deranged, weak minded, unimaginative Czar in the Kremlin must find out…

***

In a variant of this, the innuendo becomes the reality by association. Putin and his collaborators do not behave any differently in Ukraine, accusing the Ukrainians to be “Nazis” or “nationalists”, and genociders… When actually the context, and the causation were originally created by the Kremlin…. which conveninetly forgets that France  was defeated in May-June 1940, thanks to Russian oil: without it, Nazi tanks and planes would not have moved (Russian help to the Nazis extended to all sorts of metal ores, cotton, rubber and even food which Nazi Germany could not have done without). 

***

Reality, as it is perceived, is made of personal, and cultural facts, which are actually generalized neuro-hormonal networks, united by axonal chains of human theorization, most of them culturally grounded… The mind invents meta-causal chains between elements of perceived reality and causal chains viewed as elements of reality.

Causal chains, meta or not, right or wrong, make remembrance easier, so they are ubiquitous. They tend to go according to the principle of economy of energy: the simpler the inference, the more seductive it is. This is why math and science are hard, because they are not, at first, the simplest (although they are the simplest in the long term, as they deduce enormous multitudes, from few axioms). 

Those causal chains may well be wrong, and evolution became aware of that fact while the human mind became ever more an evolutionary advantage. To palliate for lack of imagination or inverted causation, and other fantasies, the dreaming state jumbles everything in all sorts of ways, leaving faint implications chains behind. So doing, fantastic dreams may stumble accidentally on a closer picture of reality which leaves a trace as potential axonal pathways, and even potential associations of emotions…. This is what is called the subconscious…

It maybe very far removed from first impressions: at first sight, the sun is small, and turns around. Culture says otherwise and is correct. The full logic of astronomy is simpler, but could only arise from the (then) fantastic dreams of ancient astronomers.

A higher sense of reality is a higher sense of morality, because it fosters in a civilization a higher probability of survival. Thus a diversity of strong experiences has its own moral advantage. These experiences do not have to be pleasant while experienced, far from it. Avalanches’ roaring, mountain lions’ and rattlesnakes’ music is most engaging. But the most worthy of a deserving audience is stinging wasps’ buzz… https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/…/01/sting-operations/ All these are guaranteed to achieve strong elements of reality.

A mystery in this is where the meta-consciousness driving dreams is located. Well, maybe it’s not located anywhere. As parts of the brain shut down and others get excited during dreaming, a great show starts, with elements of traditional consciousness trying to establish causal chains. Those elements and causality chains most worthy of interest (from greed, fear, pleasure, whatever…) are those most memorable, and most instructive…

Patrice Ayme    

  Pata, but all too real logic exhibited:

Elements of reality are neuro-hormonal networks. Causality chains between them are also (meta) neuro-hormonal networks. The latter are easier to erase than the former, because the latter depends upon the former to exist, and the former are typically more detailed in memory, being associated from many sensory inputs, typically. So it’s possible to remeber elements of reality without remembering the causality. However, causality makes memory easier to arrange… Hence drastic rearrangement of memorized causality may well occur. I call this CAUSAL INVERSION. Dreams can facilitate, but also demolish, such patalogic.

[1] Plato claimed that all and any element of reality could be shadows on a wall. Socrates describes people who were chained all their lives, facing a blank wall. They watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them. They name these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality, but are not the real world. The shadows are elements of reality that we can perceive through our senses, while real objects can only be perceived through reason. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, deductive logic; and the theory of forms. The essay above is revealing HOW logic is evolved, and how “elements of reality” are correctly guessed, established and questioned. Socrates’ elements of reality were often nonsensical. He described his dreams as “daemons” not the activity of neuro-hormonal networks, etc…

The hard edge of today’s quest for “reality”, the forefront, is called Quantum Theory, and it’s full of questions, solutions and technological wonders… Techno-logical: notice the apparition of logic in techne… But how was the logic elaborated? Dream on…

MBS: Make Saudi Arabia Into An Open Society.

What’s the way out for the world? More advanced thinking, as produced by direct democracy. The Open Society, was practiced by Athens, 25 centuries ago, and extolled by general Pericles and his thoughtfull spouse, the great philosopher Aspasia: “Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him.” The Open Society is a crucial ingredient in real democracy.

Arguably the two most successful polities the direct descendency of which we presently enjoy, Greece-Rome and Qin, practiced quite a bit of the same openness, buttressed by legalism. Rome copied deliberately the leading, most democratic Greek City states. China and Europe then descend from then most-Open Societies, Qin, Greek democracies and their Roman parrot.

Athens’ power rested on high tech, her navy, and silver mines (the latter paying for the former; slaves operated the mines). 

Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salam (MBS) has been the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia. He has modernized this fascinating realm with violent enthusiasm. It is unlikely he could keep on modernizing without violence: a Saudi king was assassinated by a nephew, a little while ago. MBS has many enemies inside the Royal family, let alone in the rest of Arabia… naturally he has to look terrifying to insure his own safety. Authentic progressives must agree that more progress is to be had with MBS than with regressive raving maniacs mad with god… who have often been the alternative.

***

MBS should make Saudi Arabia into an Open Society. This is the best, safest solution. How safe is that for the Saud family? How safe is it for Arabia?

Arabia is so backwards in mentality, from Wahhabism, that it will take a long time to effect change, and MBS and eventual successors, should, and could lead the charge. So as change leaders, they would be safe for a long time… considering the long way to go.

A precedent calling for forging ahead arises from the French Revolution. Louis XVI of France’s error was to stop half-way: Louis saw the need for change, his wife read the most recent subversive literature (Voltaire, Rousseau)… and Louis had not wanted to be king. Conscious that French plutocrats had to pay taxes (they were exempt and the US war of independence had ruined France), Louis decided to start a revolution. However, when he found that it involved a constitutional monarchy, he tried to stop the revolution. One thing led to another, many heads got cut.

Emperor Nicholas II of Russia had the same exact problem: Nicholas instituted democratizing reforms, so democratizing that the Kaiser and the Prussian General Staff thought that their own military dictatorship was undermined by them. However, after the Germans declared war, Nicholas abandoned all and any reforms… although he was stridently and extensively warned of the danger of doing so… for years.

So the advice of progressives to MBS should be for MBS to lead the change and the charge, and not falter: be both the autocrat in chief, and the revolutionary leader. He can then argue that he inherited the problem, and nobody is in a better position to solve it. He can also argue he needs muscle to do so against the old believers (Peter the Great of Russia had the same problem) and various plutocrats who inherited wealth and power too. A show of goodwill will bring forgetfulness, and redemption. An Open Society is always smarter and, as catastrophic changes are sure to pile up, as climate change accelerates, Saudi Arabia needs all the brains it can get. MBS can stay the brain in chief, even if rough. Open up!

***

Some are particularly resentful because a Washington Post journalist was cut up, more or less alive, and MBS had something to do with it, considering some of his subordinates did it (all of SA is subordinate to MBS!)

Well, yes, sure. And also MBS is criticized for the war in Yemen with opponents, the Houthis, propped by Iran. MBS was allied with the UAE. I am no specialist of that conflict. Obama sent drones and hunted Al Qaeda in the Bin Laden ancestral home region…. busting the occasional weddings, killing hundreds. I don’t see why Obama gets a pass for killing wedding parties of thoroughly innocent people, hundreds of innocents whom Obama ordered killed, while MBS is vilipended because some Saudi security tortured one opponent to death. If it turns out, it’s Obama and the US Deep State who got MBS and the UAE in Yemen.

Indeed, Yemen’s civil war began in 2014 when Houthi insurgents—Shiite rebels with links to Iran and a history of rising up against the Sunni government—took control of Yemen’s high altitude capital and largest city, Sana’a, demanding lower fuel prices and a new government. After failed negotiations, the rebels seized the presidential palace in January 2015. President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi and his government resigned. Beginning in March 2015, a coalition of Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia launched a campaign of economic isolation and air strikes against the Houthi insurgents, with U.S. logistical and intelligence support… So MBS’ Yemen adventure started in Washington.

***

There is a big difference between very discreetly expressed view points of MBS, and say the rehashing of atrocious mass-murdering world-imperial Kremlin propaganda to which Pope Francis abandonned himself recently, in a most un-Christian and thoroughly regressive way. The Pope said that a big “very wise guy” told him that NATO was “barking at the gates of Russia”. It apparently did not come to the attention of the geographically unaware Pope that Russia is all over Eurasia, over 11 time zones. The Pope doesn’t realize that it is immoral that a country owns so much real estate conquered over dozens of ethnicities… Even Lenin and Stalin understood this… But the Pope doesn’t.

So MBS? MBS has a difficult situation. The Pope doesn’t. And Putin threatened the entire planet with “radioactive ashes” if it doesn’t obey him, in an attempted return to the maximal expansion of the Kremlin empire achieved when Europe conquered Africa… to pacify and modernize it… Whereas Russia was establishing its Nineteenth Century empire for strictly genocidal purposes over many old nations (including the Balts, Poland, Ukraine… not just Tatars and Chechens).

No evil of that order with MBS, but a will to progress. So give him reason to progress more. The same applies to other authoritarian regimes progressing out of tenebrous pasts…

Patrice Ayme

Mecca at night. The scale is enormous. Kaaba, the Cube, is the 13 meter tall black building at the center of Islam’s most important mosque, the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is perfectly visible in the center of the photograph. The cult of the meteorite at the center is older than Islam. Many buildings from Mahomet’s time have been destroyed to be replaced by modern ones, sadly. It’s also sad that non-Muslims are forbidden in Mecca. It would be good to open that up. Any savage can penetrate Christianism’s most sacred buildings (although not all).

Energy Sustainability

I have held for years that the math of so-called “sustainables” was unsustainable… Present day battery-electric tech requires too many expensive elements and ways to be the end-all, cure-all solution.

I have come to suspect that many so-called ecologists are actually agents of the fossil fuel industry. Those pseudo-ecologists promote non-economical and, or non-scalable energy “solutions”… knowing full well that they solve nothing much, if at all. A full blown wind-solar energy production requires a 100% available fossil fuel industry… if one excludes nuclear… That’s the trick which serves the fossil fuel plutocrats, including Vladimir Putin.

France has no fossil fuels, and thus no agenda for promoting high fossil fuel prizes. However retired secret services heads have revealed in their memoirs that French ecologists were paid by the Kremlin. This explains why French fanatical ecologists propagandized for no nuclear power, with wind and solar, a cocktail which requires 100% dependency on fossil fuels… (This evil psychological foundation of many a French pseudo-ecologist may also explain why some of them abuse sexually women and little children… and all of Paris knew about it, doing nothing… Why? The crimes against persons, women and children, hid a much bigger crime, against the planet and humanity themselves…)

Putting the main effort, not on wind and solar, but hydrogen and nuclear is how to get out of the CO2 crisis... Small nuclear reactors can produce green hydrogen as part of the cooling process… Solar and wind can complement harmoniously… But only complement. Rusted wind mills ruins off the French Atlantic coast, too expensive to remove, are a sobering warning. And those windmills are not 300 meters tall. Recycling giant carbon fiber epoxy blade hundreds of feet long will be too expensive…

A way to mitigate out maybe to devise walls with smaller, easier to recycle windmills… But the main point stays that the main effort has to be on hydrogen, hydrogen derivatives, and nuclear… small nuclear, standardized small nuclear, high temperature, thorium, and all sorts of fission and fusion…

Patrice Ayme

Proposed small nuclear reactor module. Basically the idea is that, if everything imaginable goes wrong, one can just forget about the reactor planted deep underground. Absence of sophisticated, complex systems make such reactors safe and economical. Argentina and China are building or connected to the grid much larger version still small, safe and economical relative to standard reactors…

Here is a more detailed post on some of the subject by my friend Ian Miller, a New Zealand physical chemist and writer:

ianmillerblog

Sustainability is the buzzword. Our society must use solar energy, lithium-ion batteries, etc to save the planet, at least that is what they say. But have they done their sums?. Lost in this debate is the fact that many of the technologies use relatively difficult to obtain elements. In a previous post I argued that battery technology was in trouble because there is a shortage of cobalt, required to make the cathode work for a reasonable number of cycles. Others argue that we could obtain sufficient elements. But if we are going to be sustainable, we have to be sustainable for an indefinite length of time, and mining is not sustainable; you can only dig up the ore once. Of course, there are plenty of elements left. There is more gold in the sea than has ever been mined; the problem is that it is too dilute. Similarly, most elements…

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Perverse History, Perverse Civilization.

Civilizations, like people, have moods, and act accordingly. Kremlin Russia’s successfully vile and hyper violent history has brought us minds like Putin’s, vile, hyper violent, claiming there are only “sovereigns” and “colonies”.

In 2016, Putin asked students if they knew where Russia ended. A boy rose and stood:”Russia ends at the Behring Straight, Mr. President!” “Wrong,” replied Putin. Putin corrected the miscreant:”Russia never ends!” 

President Vladimir V. Putin views himself as carrying on the task of the Russian czars. Sprawling back in an armchair, spread like an octopus, basking in chuckling self-satisfaction, Mr. Putin started a televised meeting with young entrepreneurs in Moscow on Thursday June 9, 2022, by reflecting on Peter the Great’s 18th-century conquest of the Baltic coast, describing that land as rightfully Russian.

“He wasn’t taking anything away — he was returning it,” Mr. Putin said of that territory, before hinting that he was doing the same thing in his war in Ukraine. “He was returning it and strengthening it. Well, apparently, it has also fallen to us to return and to strengthen.” And he laughted. A scared old 5 feet 5 inch, anti-western, backward looking, regressive poisoning weasel, compares himself to the young and unafraid Peter the Great, a 6 feet 8 inch, forward looking, fanatically pro-western, forward-thinking progressive fighting to death the religious establishment and all old ways, who succeeded to change Russia from the past into the future.

The Baltic nations, then, are next to be “returned”. Thus, like Ukraine in Putin’s estimation, those Baltic nations are not nations at all, but confiscated Russian territories… Just like Ukraine, which Putin has insisted, is not a country, but a piece of Russia ruled by Nazis. According to Putin it seems as if Eurasia should have just one country, to which everything has to be “returned”.

That reasoning was rejected, even by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. That, arguably infernal, trio knew well that the Moscow led empire could survive only if the nations that the Czars had conquered were given a lot of autonomy. So Ukraine joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a “republic”… And, as a “republic” was one of the 40 founding members of the UN. 

Contrast this with Putin’s position, expressed June 9: “It’s impossible — do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we do not intend to build that fence,” Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, were talking about an union of republics, thus recognizing a measure of democracy, individuality and autonomy. Putin is just talking about “Russia”. And “Russia” has “no fences”, it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. Putin: “Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.“

***

And what does “Russian” mean? In a nutshell, around 12 centuries ago, Novgorod hired Swedish warriors to rule itself, and those warlords promptly went down and conquered what became Ukraine, an exceptionally wealthy land, for agriculture and minerals. Rus was thus created, and then expanded eastward. However, by the 1200s, the centrifugal forces which had affected Novgorod 4 centuries earlier made themselves manifest again: Rus was too extended, too wealthy, too diverse… Unfortunately at that point of disunion, the invading Mongols show up, asking for submission, in the footsteps of their ancestors the Huns. 

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Putin in presidential transcript, June 9, 2022: We visited the exhibition dedicated to the 350th birth anniversary of Peter the Great. Almost nothing has changed. It is a remarkable thing. You come to this realisation, this understanding.

Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.

… Narva is in Estonia… I sent the following to the New York Times which had claimed the door was shutting with Russia, and it was sad. It was censored, showing, once again the complicity between new York oligarchy and Russian oligarchy:

Moscow’s autocratic run, launched with Ivan I “Moneybags” started with a cynical collaboration with the Golden (Mongol) Horde, as tax collector for all Russias. It was highly successful, creating the world’s largest empire, colonizing many nations and religions.

However, overall and in the fullness of time, democracy has proven more adept to create the civilization we need to exist. Now, though, tyrants can muster greater powers than ever before. And the planet has become very small: rockets can go around in an hour or so. A final confrontation looms, as Biden correctly pointed out, many times.

Just today Putin declared that Peter The Great was “returning” the Baltic nations to Russia in the 1700s, not conquering them… and that he, Putin, was doing the same. 

As many a tyrant through history, and Kremlin rulers for seven centuries, Putin is distracting his oppressed population with a foreign war which enables him to declare all his opponents, “traitors”, “Nazis”, “criminals”, etc. Nothing new here… Except for one thing Putin has been leveraging: nuclear weapons. This is the first time in history a tyrant can, and threatens to destroy the world, if he does not succeed to conquer. 

A sad moment, for sure. But also a moment that cannot be denied.

We are confronted to the choice of submitting to the will of one man, his vision of humanity, or utter destruction. It is crucial that this one man doesn’t get his way: other tyrants, starting with Xi, would follow his path. It is not a question of imposing democracy, but surviving this.

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Putin wants to do the same as Peter: getting back what was Russian all along… Notice that, right now, Russia occupies Prussia, something even Peter the Great didn’t do.

How did Russians become the way they are? Because tyranny has ruled Russia, and Kremlin led tyranny has been so highly successful… as a tyranny and land gobbler The enormous physical size of Russia has created imperviousness to other influences, which have been kept at a distance. The mood created by the tyrant in Moscow ruled without a rival, or even an awareness. Russia’s enormous geography made it isolated, and propicious to intellectual and mental fascism. It was all so suffocating that Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, created a new capital far from Moscow and its Kremlin, a kind of fortress full of churches.

In the rest of Europe, the situation has been different: diversity ruled, very different ways of thinking and even emoting have been entangled. As Blaise Pascal put it in the 1600s: Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà. Truth before the  Pyrénées, error beyond them.  When Pascal wrote this, France and Spain, separated by the  Pyrénées, were in the middle of a war which lasted more than 2 centuries, creating the Netherlands and finishing with the Duke of Anjou, Louis XIV’s second-eldest grandson, becoming Philip V of Spain in 1700. Louis XIV had ejected 10% of the population of France, the Protestants who kept on protesting at a distance, creating elites in other countries who hated French autocracy. That in turn caused the next monster war, the war of The Succession of Spain, which brought enormous losses of French territory, and immense misery, especially in France (although the grandson stayed in place, and the present king of Spain is a descendant…)

In non-Russian Europe, it has become impossible to be unaware of opposite points of view and how maddening the differences could get… About nothing much. The Franco-English war, the so-called “100 years war” which lasted nearly 5 centuries (1300s until 1815), originated as a civil war, French plutocrats against French plutocrats… They called themselves aristocrats, power of the best, but they were not good for the majority of the population.

Now Europeans, outside of Russia, understand that differences enrich, and otherwise do not matter that much, and one shouldn’t go to war about them. Indeed the price for not understanding Vive La Difference is atrocious wars. And their consequences (100 millions killed by the so-called Spanish flu of 1918)… At least differences do not matter between Europeans… and their cultural descendants… and, in some ways, ascendants, the Americans. I said ascendants, because Europe learned quite a few things from the Americas, not just tomatoes, potatoes, and rubber… But also the Nature God and various ecological, or martial ways. 

Russians also learned a lot, and maybe too much, fighting the Mongols, Tartars, Tatars, and other bellicose nomad nations. Nomads have to be bellicose, but, ultimately, once the nomads have been pushed away, aggressivity from a civilization becomes perverse.

It is traditional among the woke and other pseudo-progressives to criticize European imperialism… But careful studies show that the reality was more about empires of the weak proposing deals that the Natives could not refuse, either because they were dead from Euro-African pandemics, or because said deals were irresistible. This is what I have long believed and it is now found in an academic book  “Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order”.

Actually, one should consider that the greater degree of democracy of Europe facilitated directly (nicer power) and indirectly (ideological, scientific, technological) European domination.

Although some of these aspects also applied to Russia (for example Behring was a German officer employed by the Czar), the bottom line in Kremlin Russia stayed the mood set up by Prince Alexander Nevsky and his grandson Ivan Danilovich Kalita. The mood was not to stand for progressive principle and democracy, but instead for power at any cost. Alexander was installed as the Grand Prince of Vladimir (i.e., the supreme Russian ruler) in 1252… by the Mongols. Alexander, made previously Prince of Kyiv by the Mongols, faithfully supported Mongol rule within his domains. In 1259 Alexander led an army to the northern city of Novgorod, an independent republic (at the origin of Rus), and forced Novgorod to pay tribute it had previously refused to pay to the Golden Horde.

Some will say that Alexander had no choice, that the ends justified the means. Maybe or probably. But the fact remains that, with Russian civilization in balance, Nevsky and his grandson Ivan I collaborated with evil. A traditional mentality was founded, of reverence to an evil leader, often wholeheartedly supported by many Russian intellectuals. And that mood was made sacrosanct: Alexander Nevsky was canonized in 1557 CE. These observations have not escaped Ukrainians, and they are starting to remove statues of Alexander Nevsky and various famous “Ruscist” (Russian + fascist) writers.

The situation with imperial Russia is completely different, and deeply perverse from the rest of Europe, because aggression was used as a method of extermination, relentlessly, for centuries, against fellow MASTER CIVILIZATIONS (Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, etc.).

As Putin put it on June 9 2022: ” I promise that I will try to respond to all your proposals and ideas. It is easier for me to do this than for you. I just give instructions; you need to come up with ideas, while I just need to listen to you and give instructions. (Laughter.)”

Return it all! It’s all mine! We Russians own all of this, Peter said so! I have no ideas, just instructions!

This is why the Kremlin dictatorship has to be crushed: the model of one smart idiot giving instructions to everybody, according to a perverse vision of history he erroneously claims to share with Peter the Great (who tortured and killed his one surviving son… one of many people Peter was very familiar with and had to kill in very torturous ways… Some of them he argued with as they were dying, broken by him)… has to be crushed. 

Maybe Peter had to do all this killing and fighting: surely he couldn’t let the Swedes won at Poltava… But Putin did not have to cause mayhem. Comparing himself with Peter the Great, a two meter tall giant, Putin, in his shortness of vision, forgets that Peter had many excuses, excuses which Putin does not have, and three centuries have extinguished the context in which Peter thrived… with a real Swedish invasion and before that, extremely obdurate Christian fanatics, the “Old Believers“, organizing conspiracies, plots, and coup after coup… who had to be broken at the wheel just so the country could live. Instead, Putin is allied to the present day version of the Old Believers…

With its gigantic territory and interesting civilization, Russia has a lot to offer… especially while the planet warms up. But, as it strays into nuclear plated fascism, democracy can’t make any quarters… Should we falter in our defense of democracy it would surely be our ride to hell!

It goes without saying that similar charges can be made against the English American colony’s descendant regime, for somewhat similar reasons. Many of our essays have adressed this.

Perversity brought domination of the beholders. But now this is not a sure thing anymore. Times have changed: they are more subtle. It is time to understand this, what role perversity played, and why, and thus how to transmogrify it.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The core of the present essay, found in italics above, was censored by the New York Times propaganda machine as a comment to an article on June 9, 2022, written by a Russian, who claimed it was so sad that the door was closing between the US and Russia. Never mind that it is Russia which is slamming the door to democracy, while Putin is playing Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator, with the twist of threatening to blow up the planet… It stays troubling that the newspaper of record in the USA keeps on rejecting isegoria and parrheisia…

Must Win World War Of Plutocracy Against Democracy

The nuclear tyranny in Moscow is the sort of regime civilization cannot share the planet with: to conquer land it fancied, Putin threatened “any country which intervened with consequences you have never seen in your history” . 

To surrender to the threat of the usage of nuclear weapons from one’s opponent after first resisting a war of conquest, is worse than surrendering to any previous tyranny in history. Indeed no tyranny in history had the means to destroy humanity, nor expressed the explicit desire to do so as Putin and his accomplices did.

What is democracy? The attempt by civilization to set people free from oligarchy (the rule of the few). What is plutocracy? Literally, hell-power. Oligarchies aren’t sustainable, without  calling upon evil power, because people are not made to be slaves, and they increasingly resist (inside the dictatorship, or outside).

Historical dictators are in general proof of this turn to hell-power: their methods get worse with time,  until they get destroyed.

Civilization was rendered possible by power, but, without democracy, that power can exponentiate in the hands of a few, who then, absolutely corrupted by power, will use ever more evil methods until they become so stupid, they are finally destroyed.

Nuclear energy and other new powerful tech made oligarchs more powerful than ever, and the plutocratic culmination it brings to the planet is so dangerous that civilization will not be able to survive it.

Only democracy makes civilization sustainable. Giving Putin a reward, any reward, for his evil ways invites future dictators to be even worse with threats of nuclear war. 

Because Putin threatened civilization explicitly with annihilation is the ultimate crime. This is why he and his mentality must be destroyed. Nuclear war will not be avoided by doing what those who threaten it want democracies to do. Our survival requires punishment.

Star Fish nuclear explosion at 11 pm, fifteen seconds after detonation over Johnson Island as seen from Maui at on top of the volcano, at 3,000 meter elevation, 1200 kilometers away. The nuke was exploded 400kms above ground, in space, instantaneously shutting down much electronics in Hawaii from E-M blast..

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: A shorter version of the comment above replied to a NYT editorial calling to surrender Ukraine to Putin. My comment, mostly what is above, was carefully censored. Now traitor president Macron of France, apparently a small greedy mind, called to once again for the victory of Putin (not as something that he wishes, but as something that he, and his German sidekick, Chancellor Olaf Scholtz see as ineluctable… while pointing out, in complete contradiction, that Putin should not be humiliated (if Putin can’t be defeated, how could he be humiliated?) I was deeply irritated by the NYT censorship, so I sent another comment, which was published immediately… I will show this one next, because it encapsulate the problem.