Direct Air Capture Of CO2? Too early To Make A Dent. Another Devious Scheme By The Haves.

Direct air capture of CO2 will make sense once we have gigantic quantities of quasi free energy to do it. Say with nuclear fusion, and we can terraform an Earth with too much CO2. However, in the present state of primary energy production, which is more than 85% from fossil fuels… It makes no sense. 

However such schemes have now been launched by the US administration, on a massive scale. Construction is ongoing.

The cases in Iceland (quasi free energy from geothermal, friendly lava rock below, already plenty of quakes) or Texas (using CO2 to push out more oil and gas) are very special, and of no global importance [1]. Some Texas schemes use supposedly power from solar to extract CO2, and that’s laudable, and has a future… But making solar panels cost energy… The plant in Iceland is called “Mammoth”, because it’s so enormous. The ones rushed into existence in Texas are ten times larger.

We need to switch out of fossil fuels as primary energy production. That means solar and nuclear. Nuclear reactors can be made 100% safe, non proliferating, and fueled by their own waste. It is just a matter of researching a few details and deploying capital for fifth generation reactors (most reactors deployed today use second generation designs from the 1950s… made to produce not just energy but also plutonium for weapons)  

Governments are manipulated by the fossil fuel industry and those who profit from it. So lots of time and energy has been diverted towards schemes which are completely ineffective, not to say ridiculous… Or outright deceptive and exploitative! Basically taxpayer money finances industrial schemes by plutocrats. Such as maybe producing CO2 to reinject it and get even more fossil fuels out (this is actually happening see [1]).  

Europe tried carbon credits, implementing these schemes decades ago. Carbon credits  just brought deindustrialization as capital was used to build industry outside of Europe (say Vietnam or China) and then European companies got “credit” for it. Another thing carbon credits brought was rule by bureaucrats, grotesque regulations,economic calamity… That the Biden adminstration is now pursuing a European strategy is troubling.

In graphs of CO2 emissions, much of the real emissions of Europe and the USA are hidden in the Chinese and now Indian production of CO2. When consumers buy electronics made in India (say by Apple) or Vietnam, they produced that CO2 in India or Vietnam. It’s colonialism and hypocrisy just the same, and the more one deindustrializes in Europe or the US, the more one fosters this hypocritical colonialist plutocratic scheme. For example France boasts a CO2 production of 4 tons per person per year, the world’s average. Looks good, until one sees French salaries and activity collapse and one finds out that the average French person produces another seven tons overseas in the colonies (China, India, etc.).

Deindustrialization is meritorious, as far as plutocrats are concerned, because it robs We The People of any power: the French can go on strike all they want, that doesn’t interupt significantly the production of cars, oil, chemicals, and even food. As far as We The People is concerned, they should open books and find out that deindustrialization and deagriculturalization is how Italy was enslaved by the tyrants, when the Roman Republic became the fascist empire of Nero and Commodus. That was absolutely understood at the time… After the fact: Rome had become 100% dependent from production overseas. When the Vandals, newly established in North Africa, cut the shipping, Rome starved and the population had to flee (and mostly die).

The way out of the CO2 crisis is GROWTH… The opposite of official European Union policy which is DEGROWTH. The way out of the CO2 crisis is massive reindustrialization with state of the art nuclear (fisssion and fusion). This is where government money should be directed, especially at the research level… to build experimental fusion and fifth generation fission plants… Progress in high temperature magnets, which has happened, can happen some more… That in turn will have consequences everywhere… Government, that is taxpayer money should be directed at research, not plutocrats…

Patrice Ayme

[Land Use CO2 emissions not included. Real emissions of CO2 equivalent GHG are much higher than that, by roughly a third; removing CO2 then attack only two-thirds of the problem…]

[1] Occidental, a major oil company, said it planned to build 100 facilities, each capable of capturing from the air, 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. The first of these facilities is solar powered… Hence its location in a barren part of Texas. Occidental struck up a financial partnership with BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and made a deal to develop direct air capture plants with Adnoc, the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company.

In South Texas, Occidental is planning to build 30 of the plants on the King Ranch, funded in part by $1.2 billion the Biden administration last year awarded to direct air capture projects.

On the face of it, this all looks good. However the emissions run at roughly 40 billion tons of CO2… Not counting LUC, Land Use CO2 , and the other GreenHouse Gases. Counting those we are well above 55 billion tons of CO2 equivalents. So even one hundred plants at one million tons a year will make a 2% dent… We need to make a 100% dent….

Research As Moral Principle: The Case Of The Energy Crisis

Energy, Justice, Research

Humanity is search. Humanity is when evolution has become conscious, and searches for solutions to the point of inventing problems to resolve. This, like the evolution of the universe it animates, runs its course. Resistance is futile.

***

Is Using Fossil Fuels Moral?

Biden just allowed a major oil project, on Federal land, in Alaska [1]. Is that moral?

Morality Is Not So Much What’s Good, But What PERDURES:

What’s morality? Is morality the avoidance of evil? Nobody understand fully what evil is, because one would need to understand the future thoroughly.

Morality is from Old French moral (14c.) and directly from Latin moralis “proper behavior of a person in society,” literally “pertaining to manners,” coined by Cicero (“De Fato,” II.i) to translate Greek ethikos (see ethics)… ēthikos “ethical, pertaining to character,” from ēthos “moral character,” related to ēthos “custom”…

Greek ēthos “habitual character and disposition; moral character; habit, custom…. An important concept in Aristotle (as in “Rhetoric” II xii-xiv).

***

We are literally fumigating the planet, among other problems. Leaders blow hot wind on it all, by enjoying the fruits of pleasing the powers that be. 

The world needs energy. Historically, most energy usage, per capita, has been in the so-called “West”… which has now offshored industry to China, as it used to offshore energy to dictators. 

Justice demands that, on a worldwide basis, energy usage, per capita, be the same for all (or, at least, that there is enough energy to satisfy people’s basic needs, including maximum educational availability, which is not the case now). 

Thus, and as observed, energy usage will augment, worldwide. 

Now 84% of primary energy production, worldwide, is from fossil fuels… the same quotient as in 1980, when the alert was sounded about the necessity of cutting emissions of CO2. The lack of progress in decarbonation was mostly due to a systemic campaign against nuclear energy, which started under president Carter.   

Solar progressed enormously, but is land hungry. Wind is intermittent, and, as the greenhouse planetary heating makes the wind belt migrate towards the poles, it is likely that wind will peter out. 

So what we need is new energy sources: green hydrogen (killed by Obama on day one of his presidency, thanks to the fossil fuel lobby), new and safer small nuclear fission, thorium, and thermonuclear fusion. So a gigantic investment in research should be made (China already connected new nuclear tech to the grid). Meanwhile, one must gain time… And that means new fossil fuels, hopefully cleaner. 

Fossil fuel propaganda claims that its own decline is around the corner. The graphs show that’s a lie, but it’s OK, as long as more money goes towards research in new, decarbonated energy. 

The truth is that we just don’t have the technology right now to decarbonate most of primary energy production. We need more science, bringing in revolutionary tech like room temp superconductors, or photovoltaics which can work at night (using infrared).

We presently need fossil fuels, so that civilization will not collapse. So using fossil fuels is moral, when no alternative can be found. But we also need to stop traveling as if there is no tomorrow and stop heating stuff as if we were Neanderthals, and heat pumps didn’t exist. The San Francisco Bay Area government’s regulatory commission met and 20 votes for, none against, decided to outlaw the sale of fossil fuel heaters and furnaces, starting in 2030. The regulatory commission declared that somebody had to lead, and it may as well be the Bay Area. Notice that California prouces fossil fuels… Also notice that there is such a thing as a Bay Area government, an accord between 110 cities… A democratic thing. It gives more manoeuvrability than Switzerland, while democratic… 

We also need to find, and deploy decarbonated solutions from science to be discovered next.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] In How Big of a Climate Betrayal Is the Willow Oil Project? March 16, 2023. The New York Times says:

President Biden approved ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal lands in Alaska, the announcement landed simultaneously with the thud of betrayal and the air of inevitability. On the campaign trail, Biden had promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”

No slowdown: Below is the global primary energy production graph. Right, it includes decarbonated sourse such as nuclear and intermittents (aka “renewables”)… BUT, notice, they are basically neglectable!

RENEWABLE HOAX

Abstract: Sun and wind are INTERMITTENT energy sources. But there is no commensurate storage of this intermittence. Thus, for each Gigawatt of Intermittent Energy, one Gigawatt of back-up power needs to be installed. ABSENT CARBON-FREE NUCLEAR or HYDROGEN, this means one Gigawatt of FOSSIL FUELS back-up for each Gigawatt of intermittent energy installed. As observed. Hence the position of self-proclaimed anti-nuclear ecologists is truly pro-fossil fuels (the hydrogen technology would take a while to develop, but nuclear exists already). Thus CO2 emissions are at an all time high.

***

PUTIN And The HYDROCARBON LOBBY Seem To Have Devised The Renewable Energy Hoax. The same plutocrats, oligarchs and media propaganda are behind it all… The Biden administration own studies show this.

4 trillion dollars spent in so-called renewables, in 40 years and a reduction of only 1% or so in primary energy production from hydrocarbons. We are still above 80% in total primary energy from hydrocarbons… And that doesn’t count making plastics from hydrocarbons…

4 trillion dollars in bogus renewable energy is as much not applied in research, education, health care, etc. And the bogus renewable energy, by comforting those who engage in air travel and other energy sins, acts as a moral hazard. Bogus renewable only encourages surfers to fly on the other side of the planet to catch that wave (I had a memorable clash with a group of world class surfers flying from Paris to Tahiti, to catch that wave, and who, per their status, got priority over yours truly… although I was in line first and had paid for my family reason flight myself… I travelled for family reasons, indeed. The horde of surfers was paid by magazines, that is, plutocrats…)

Clearly the strategy of the world has been so bad in this CO2 crisis, that it’s laughable, and should be discontinued. Is it? No, and there is doubling down, especially in Europe, where some politicians, with a straight face, have decided to reduce energy use by 10% (ten percent)… next year. No problem! Uncle Xi has just reelected himself dictator of China and he commands hundreds of millions of obsequious slaves to make stuff… And Uncle Xi builds one coal plant a week! As Comrade Xi takes over the planet, he will take care of his little Europeans…

Forget Trump and his dreams of national self-sufficiency, and listen to Biden’s administration: “Nuclear Power is the Most Reliable Energy Source and It’s Not Even Close… “ An official government report, March 24, 2021.

***

The intermittent wind and solar have a problem: they are intermittent, unpredictable, and their average power output is way lower than official maximum output. 

Solar delivers only 25% of its rated output in electricity, wind only 35%, and natural gas 57%. As recently as 2010, coal delivered 67% but has fallen precipitously to 40%. 

Why is coal becoming inefficient? According to the National Energy Technology Laboratory, America’s coal plants increasingly are operated in inefficient, stop-start fashion to support wind and solar. A coal furnace may need hours to reach the temperature to make steam. The same holds for gas and oil, magnifying the risk of breakdowns and blackouts as observed all over the countries switching to renewables. 

Nuclear energy has by far the highest capacity factor of any other energy source. This means nuclear power plants are producing maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year.

That’s about nearly 2 times more than natural gas and coal units, and almost 3 times or more reliable than wind and solar plants.

***

Another aspect is deindustrialization in democracies. It is striking that hundreds of French schools are too cold, and that in France the Prime Minister announced energy consumption will have to be reduced by 10%, with cuts to industry. Now French industry is a shadow of its former self, already. Moreover, the country’s CO2 emissions per capita are already less than world average, 4 tons per capita, per year. That’s about 20% of Australia. Meanwhile a thousand kilometers to the east, more than 10,000 armored military vehicles have been destroyed in 8 months in an all-out war. One would think the time is to reindustrialization and rearmament. But no: the so-called “ecologists” look forward to a return to the Middle Ages under Czar Putin. 

Indeed, as industry is cut in democracies, it flourishes in other parts with less democracy and more arrangements for crooks… The global plutocracy profits from this traffic and tax mitigation it brings. (One should notice that, starting under Trump, and now much extended under Biden, a program of reindustrialization is under way in the USA… Differently from Western Europe.)

As I said many times, hydrogen has to be developed for storage and transportation (especially fuel cell-electric…) But that’s fully compatible with nuclear power. Actually a way to cool high temperature reactors would be to make hydrogen, and that has the advantage of making the reactors water independent…

The so-called “renewable” policy in energy for the last 40 years looks like something devised by Putin and the hydrocarbon lobbies… And also those financial operators who instinctively fear to be replaced, in awe due to them, by vulgar scientists rolling out new forms of nuclear power, immensely mighty, safe and effective: small modular reactors, thorium, high temperature, pebble, radioactive waste burning, etc.  

Aanother aspect is deindustrialization in democracies. It is striking that hundreds of French schools are too cold, and that in France the Prime Minister annouced energy consumption will have to be reduced by 10%, with cuts to industry. Now French industry is a shadow of its former self, already. Moreover, the country’s CO2 emissions, per capita ar already lees than world average, 4 tons per capita, per year. That’s about 20% of Australia. Meanwhile a thousand kilometer to the east, more than 10,000 armored military vehicles have been destroyed in 8 months in an all-out war. One would think the time is to reindustrialization and rearmament. But no: the so-called “ecologists” look forward a return to the Middle Ages under Czar Putin. 

Indeed, as industry is cut in democracies, it flourishes in other parts with less democracy and more accomodations for crooks… The global plutocracy profits from this traffic and tax mitigation it brings. (One should notice that, starting under Trump, and now much extended under Biden, a program of reindustrialization is under way in the USA… Differently from Western Europe.)

As I said many times, hydrogen has to be developed, for storage and transportation (fuel cell-electric…) But that’s fully compatible with nuclear. Actually a way to cool high temperature reactors would be to make hydrogen, and that has the advantage of making the reactors water independent…

So called renewables will be very useful if hydrogen storage and transportation is available. So the hydrogen economy has to be developed, and the base energy has to be nuclear.

Patrice Ayme 

 

Biden adminstration’s own graph, 2021… Those who have not studied this sort of things do not have a cogent opinion on what to do with the energy crisis…

Schröder, Merkel, Plutocracy: New York Times Censorship Series

As long as the West gives a billion dollars a day to Putin, by purchasing Russian hydrocarbons, Putin knows the West is not serious about opposing him. The Russian economy has become a war economy, with weapons factories going 24/7. Paradoxically, the Western sanctions help that way. So everybody is happy: Putin runs a stronger and more lethal dictatorship, and failed to conquer Ukraine in a clean manner, enabling him to destroy it completely instead… which is what he truly wants to do [1].

Corruption in politicians is a big problem. Politicians should be legally obligated not to profit from the office they have been elected, or selected for… For the rest of their lives.

Putin genocides in Chechnya and Ukraine are part and parcel of the general plutocratic problem which ruins the West, democracy, the climate, and even the biosphere. Putin was long the darling of the WEF, World Economic Forum and Davos. The WEF conspiracy to feed and empower the Russian oligarchy, headed by the KGB/FSB, dates from the 1990s. Putin should have become known as a genocidal tyrant after he killed one Chechen out of six.

However, Germany made itself fully dependent upon the genocidal tyrant, years after the genocide, and while fully cognisant of said genocide. It was apparently assumed by German leaders that greed would fix hate, and the will to kill. Now Germany and other European genocidal collaborators are sending more than a billion dollars a day to feed the genocidal tyrant’s war crime factory.

In light of this, and her personal, murky history, one may wonder whether Angela Merkel was not a double agent (truly working for Putin’s KGB). She declared that, when the KGB approached her, she brushed them off by telling them that “she talked too much”. This sounds like disinformation to me: Merkel knew that the fact that the KGB tried to recruit her would come up, so she planted plausible denial. She had junior dictatorial positions and became spokesperson for the Stalinian East German state. Putin and his Western enablers have to be stopped, arrested.

***

The preceding comment to an article about the corruption of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder,was censored by the New York Times. Why, we don’t know. Was it because I insinuated that Putin was an adored child and instrument of the WEF?

Censoring without good legal basis should be illegal, be it on Internet social media, or conventional media. Censorship can be used to steer public opinion, which is a violation of democracy. Moreover media can get to know some ideas and then steal them (personally observed many times). For example I will not be surprised that in a distant future, if higher ups decided she is past her expiration date, the same ideas will surface about Merkel (I had excoriated Schröder and his greed for years, as I had that of Obama, etc.)

***

Here are extracts of

The Former Chancellor Who Became Putin’s Man in Germany
Gerhard Schröder, who is paid almost $1 million a year by Russian-controlled energy companies, has become a pariah. But he is also a symbol of Germany’s Russia policy. (April 23, 2022.)

HANOVER, Germany — On the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, 17 days after Gerhard Schröder left office as chancellor of Germany, he got a call on his cellphone. It was his friend President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Putin was pressing Mr. Schröder to accept an offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany.

“Are you afraid to work for us?” Mr. Putin had joked. Mr. Schröder might well have been, given the appearance of possible impropriety — the pipeline he was now being asked to head had been agreed to in the final weeks of his chancellorship, with his strong support.

He took the job anyway.

Seventeen years later, the former chancellor, who recounted the events himself in a pair of rare interviews, remains as defiant as ever…

… Germany is deeply reliant on Russian gas, giving Mr. Putin coercive leverage over Europe while filling the Kremlin’s war chest.

That dependency grew out of a German belief — embraced by a long succession of chancellors, industry leaders, journalists and the public — that a Russia bound in trade would have too much to risk in conflict with Europe, making Germany more secure while also profiting its economy.

“He took advantage of the reputation and influence of the chancellor’s office and offered himself up as an agent for Russian interests to get rich,” said Norbert Röttgen, a conservative lawmaker, former minister and longtime Russia hawk.

…Mr. Schröder, now 78, spoke with undiminished swagger, cracking jokes but arguing in essence that, well, if he got rich, then so did his country. When it came to Russian gas, everyone was on board: “They all went along with it for the last 30 years,” he said. “But suddenly everyone knows better.”….

…Mr. Schröder is useful to the Russian leader as a cat’s paw to further his own interest in hooking Germany on cheap Russian gas.

Germany’s reliance on Russian gas surged to 55 percent before Russia’s attack on Ukraine began in February, from 39 percent in 2011, amounting to 200 million euros, or about $220 million, in energy payments every day to Russia.

It has helped make Mr. Putin perhaps one of the world’s richest men, has buoyed his otherwise feeble economy, and has enabled and emboldened him to pursue his aggression in Ukraine

Even as Mr. Putin was massing troops on the Ukraine border last fall, Mr. Schröder visited the Russian leader in Sochi, one of Mr. Putin’s favorite retreats, across from the Black Sea coast that Russian forces are now trying to rip from Ukraine.

Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine began, the entire staff of Mr. Schröder’s parliamentary office resigned in protest, including his chief of staff and speechwriter of 20 years, who had been with him since his days as chancellor.

He relinquished his honorary citizenship in Hanover before his home city could strip it from him — something it last did, posthumously, to Adolf Hitler.

But Mr. Schröder is undaunted. He remains chairman of the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning about $270,000 a year, and served as head of the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2…

Three weeks before Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, Gazprom — the Soviet energy ministry turned Russian state-controlled gas company, which owns 51 percent of Nord Stream and all of Nord Stream 2 — announced that Mr. Schröder would join its board, too… since 2017 he has also presided over the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft, earning another $600,000 a year, according to public records, on top of his monthly $9,000 government stipend as former chancellor.

But even his fiercest critics acknowledge that Mr. Schröder’s close and lucrative dealings with Russia are also emblematic of his country’s decades-old approach of engagement with Russia. Lobbied aggressively by Germany’s export industry and cheered on by labor unions, successive chancellors, including Ms. Merkel, collectively engineered Germany’s dependency on Russian energy.

“Schröder is the tip of the iceberg,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former ambassador to the United States and veteran diplomat. “But there is a whole iceberg below him.”

Matthias Warnig, the chief executive of Nord Stream 2, who took part in 19 of the meetings in the report, has acknowledged having been a former spy of the Stasi, the former secret police of Communist East Germany. Stasi records show that, in February 1988, both he and Mr. Putin, when he was stationed in Dresden as a K.G.B. officer, were awarded medals for their service. But Mr. Warnig has denied reports that he had recruited spies for Mr. Putin in their old days.

In February 2015, Mr. Schröder took Mr. Warnig to see Mr. Gabriel to discuss cooperation with Russia, according to the list of meetings provided in the report. He also accompanied Nord Stream 2 executives to see Mr. Steinmeier’s ambassadors to Moscow and Brussels at the time.

Steinmeier, who is Germany’s president told the NYT: added: “Should you put my visits and meetings in Russia in a different context, I want to inform you now that I will initiate legal steps.”

Is it why the NYT decided it shouldn’t publish my assertion of the obvious: Merkel a traitor?

Nord Stream 2 was approved in June 2015, the same year that Gazprom was also allowed under the Merkel government to buy Germany’s biggest strategic gas-storage facility, where it has kept levels of gas conspicuously low for the past year in what may have been preparation for providing leverage for Mr. Putin in his war.

But Mr. Schröder said he was unbothered by the growing dependency, or by American and Eastern European warnings about Mr. Putin weaponizing energy supplies.

German Chancellor Schröder explained the thesis that, while there may be masters and slaves, masters depend as much upon those they enslave, because they couldn’t be wealthy without them… So Putin may have enslaved Germany, but Putin needs his slave.

Just the boyfriend I needed! Chancellor Schröder, left, with Putin: make me rich, and you can kill whoever you want!

[1]  Khrushchev, an Ukrainian, was the mentor of Brezhnev, another Ukrainian. Putin is very aware of this, and apparently, ressents it (Putin has different ethnic roots).

TYRANNICAL GAS: European Union Feeds The Nuclear Tyrant.

Europe’s TYRANNICAL GAS:

The EU must “GET RID OF” the gas provided by Putin and his henchmen, the head of the European Commission said on Wednesday February 16, 2022. Let’s call it TYRANNICAL GAS.

Speaking to a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, (German born, polyglot and polycultural) Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, criticized Russia for “weaponizing the energy issue” in its conflict with the EU and its associate, Ukraine. (The European Union has three presidents right now presiding over different part of the European government; the rotating presidency is held by Macron, that is, France, just as it was when Putin invaded Georgia, a weird coincidence…)

Arguing that Moscow is not a credible energy supplier anymore since Gazprom restricted natural gas supplies to Europe in the last few months despite high demand, while claiming it didn’t, von der Leyen noted that the EU has since stepped up efforts to diversify its energy imports, securing more liquified natural gas supplies from international partners.

She claimed that the Union possessed enough gas reserves for the winter in case Russia disrupts the supply.

“We must diversify our energy sources, to get rid of the dependency of Russian gas, and heavily invest in renewable energy sources,” she said, asking the bloc to draw lessons from the current crisis with Russia.

Turning to the rising tensions between Russia on one side and Ukraine and the rest of the West on the other, von der Leyen said: “Ukraine today is a stronger, freer, and more sovereign country than in 2014. This is precisely why the Kremlin is threatening it again,” she observed.

Von der Leyen said Moscow sent “conflicting signals” over the past two days by announcing the withdrawal of troops from border regions, even as Russian lawmakers voted in favor of recognizing the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine as independent.

She called on Moscow to de-escalate tensions with deeds and not just words.

Ex-Belgium PM Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, also addressed EU lawmakers. He explained that EU and NATO officials were in daily contact “working at a level of intensity and quality never seen before.” The president of the European Council presides over the meetings of EU leaders elected in the various nations constituting theEuropean Union. So contrarily to what Europhobes claim, it is a completely democratic position (limited to 2.5 years; election by double majority). 

Michel called on Russia to find the “courage” to choose diplomacy over conflict and warned that Moscow would have to face “massive consequences” in case of an invasion against Ukraine.

***

What really bothers Putin is Ukrainian DEMOCRACY and its ASSOCIATION with the EUROPEAN UNION [1]. Putin knows that his military edge on Ukraine, in particular his hypersonic advantage, is going to diminish as . It’s a case of use it, or lose it, while everything else goes to waste: the Kaiser Trap.  

Putin’s advanced weapons are full of Western electronics. If Putin had no cash, he would have no advanced weapons.

The European Union has fed a deadly cancer, the mood that the Kremlin should rule over Eurasia. Dictator Putin proposed it initially with sotto voce. Now Putin is using his nuclear voice. It could not be any clearer.  

Patrice Ayme

***

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[1]

To enlighten the gullible who look at Putin with love eyes here is a (small) part of the Association Treaty Between Ukraine and the EU (including Great Britain):

Article 1 Objectives 1. An ASSOCIATION between the UNION AND ITS MEMBER STATES, OF THE ONE PART, AND UKRAINE, OF THE OTHER PART, IS HEREBY ESTABLISHED. 

2. The aims of this association are: (a) to promote gradual rapprochement between the Parties based on common values and close and privileged links, and increasing Ukraine’s association with EU policies and participation in programmes and agencies; b) to provide an appropriate framework for enhanced political dialogue in all areas of mutual interest; (c) to promote, preserve and strengthen peace and stability in the regional and international dimensions in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter, and of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the objectives of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe of 1990; 

(d) to establish conditions for enhanced economic and trade relations leading towards Ukraine’s gradual integration in the EU Internal Market, including by setting up a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area as stipulated in Title IV (Trade and Trade-related Matters) of this Agreement, and to support Ukrainian efforts to complete the transition into a functioning market economy by means of, inter alia, the progressive approximation of its legislation to that of the Union; 

(e) to enhance cooperation in the field of Justice, Freedom and Security with the aim of reinforcing the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; 

(f) to establish conditions for increasingly close cooperation in other areas of mutual interest. 

GENERAL PRINCIPLES 

Article 2 

Respect for democratic principles, human rights and fundamental freedoms, as defined in particular in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe of 1990, and other relevant human rights instruments, among them the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and respect for the principle of the rule of law shall form the basis of the domestic and external policies of the Parties and constitute essential elements of this Agreement. Promotion of respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, inviolability of borders and independence, as well as countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, related materials and their means of delivery also constitute essential elements of this Agreement. L 161/6 EN Official Journal of the European Union 29.5.2014 Article 3 The Parties recognise that the principles of a free market economy underpin their relationship. The rule of law, good governance, the fight against corruption, the fight against the different forms of trans-national organised crime and terrorism, the promotion of sustainable development and effective multilateralism are central to enhancing the relationship between the Parties. TITLE II POLITICAL DIALOGUE AND REFORM, POLITICAL ASSOCIATION, COOPERATION AND CONVERGENCE IN THE FIELD OF FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY, etc…

Here is Putin’s answer: Hundreds of Iskander missiles already deployed more than a decade ago, and now with much more advanced versions:

Iskander Hypersonic Mach 7 missile. Explosive power is probably at least 3 tons of TNT (personal computation). It flies at 50 kms altitude, one mile and a half per second, and does evading maneuvers at 30 gs…

New Green Deal is Nuclear, Or Is Not! Nuke Alternatives!

Combining evidence from various sources, it’s obvious that fossil fuels kill directly more than ten million people, a year. So why the negative obsession with nuclear energy? We are in a fossil fuel dominated world, and the fossil fuel industry hates nuclear, so finances its hatred. OK, old style nuclear plants are unacceptable… But that was 60 years ago, and those plants were built in such a way that they made nuclear explosives. Tech has changed, and we don’t need Plutonium anymore. Have We The Sheeple been programmed to love the tar, breathe it all day long? (I long advocated Hydrogen for storage, by the way.)

Enough with the hypocrisy of Communal Wisdom! Today we celebrate! The New York Times just aligned itself on one of my most ancient positions, so I shall reiterate, and celebrate this sudden Enlightenment of the old gray lady (nickname of the NYT).This is not an original essay: most of what’s below, I have said again and again, even 10 years ago. However here is the refrain again:

90% of humanity’s worldwide energy comes from burning fossils (even more than 90% of energy comes from burning, once one integrates the burning of forests).

We burn, therefore we are. Only one emergency solution to decrease dependency on burning fuels: nuclear energy.

Yet, all too many of the haggard populations, soon to be devoured by the climate catastrophe, hate nuclear energy, that is, they hate the Sun, our nuclear Sun, and they hate the Earth, our nuclear Earth, and don’t even know it.

The world International Energy Agency just revealed that CO2 emissions from burning fossils augmented nearly 2% in 2018, up to 33 gigatons of CO2. (Total emissions of CO2 are much higher from other human activities, like pouring concrete, deforestation, etc.)

Says IEA: “Coal-fired power plants were the single largest contributor to the growth in emissions observed in 2018, with an increase of 2.9%, or 280 Mt, compared with 2017 levels, exceeding 10 Gt for the first time.” I guess pseudo-ecologists like Angela Merkel loves that. Merkel closes nuclear, because she is an ecologist, she says, while opening full up on the world’s dirtiest coal, lignite… First used by Neanderthals 80,000 years.

***

Germany Climate Mass Murder, and Its Wind Illusion:

Wind illusion? In case of massive greenhouse, winds will go down. Renewables provide 40% of German power, and government propaganda emphasizes this with relish, reminding me of “Arbeit Macht Frei” at the entrance of Auschwitz (namely a misleading slogan covering up mass murder). Although Germany has one of the most advanced renewable energy systems in the world thanks to its Energiewende (energy transition) policy, it has not reduced its emissions since Angela Merkel’s decision to phase out nuclear power following an enormously murderous tsunami in Japan from a 9 Richter quake (that’s what is called logic; at least Angela didn’t accuse the Versailles treaty: progress!)

Coal, the most CO2 emissions productive fossil fuel, now provides more than 42% of Germany’s power according to the International Energy Agency – a proportion that has been growing since the nuclear decision. The result is that Germany’s carbon emissions have been growing, since Germany’s horrendously selfish decision… while the neighbors’ CO2 emissions have been declining. France, in particular CO2 pollutes less than half of Germany per capita… due to nuclear.

Not happy with digging grand canyon sized craters in Germany, to extract “brown coal”, Germany is importanting gigantic amounts of gas from the Russian dictatorship next door…. While complaining about Trump’s strong man rule, to cover its own Putin puppet status…

Notice France is just at world average… The less polluting wealthy country in the world. Clearly, except for massive nuclear right away, the world’s total CO2 emissions will climb spectacularly as two-thirds of humanity catch up in energy utilization.

***

I denuclearize, therefore I mass murder:

Renewable energy won’t change make enough energy to do without getting 90% of our energy without burning fossil fuels. Massive nuclear and hydrogen are needed, right away. Who disagrees with this is morally indifferent, ignorant, misinformed, cruel, & will help kill 6 billions.

I could go on like that: fossil fuel burning kills at least ten million a year, probably more than a million a year in Europe (looking at the latest numbers).

How many did nuclear energy kill?

In Fukushima, the unimaginable happened: four nuclear reactors, terribly located, without back-ups, or sea wall, crushed by giant waves. And, yes, there was no back up for the cooling systems. Back-ups were in Florida. Three reactors blew up and melted down. Result? Nobody died, and the beach is reopened for babies, 15 years later.  

In other words, those who oppose nuclear energy are the lowest of the low, the sleepiest of the sheep. Let me buttress these cogent observations, in full metal jacket complement to:

“Nuclear Power Can Save the World

Expanding the technology is the fastest way to slash greenhouse gas emissions and decarbonize the economy.”

[By Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker

Drs. Goldstein and Qvist are the authors of “A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow.” Dr. Pinker is a psychology professor at Harvard. Yes, usually I criticize Pinker for finding everything pink… But here he focuses on the biggest, blackest problem…]

Young people rightly bleat in unison to mitigate the man-made climate catastrophe. However the young sheep should be advised that the question is not what to do — eliminate fossil fuels ASAP, and by 2050 at the latest— but how. It’s impossible to achieve this by ill-informed, however well-meaning, bleating.

Right now 90% of the world primary energy production is by burning fossil fuels. Repeat slowly, and try to understand what it means: we need a humongous source of energy, right away, to replace that.

Renewable energy will not change the 90% of fossil fuel burning except in a few special places such as California (a rare place with water, mountains, wind and sun).  Norway and New Zealand, full of water and mountain, get their electricity for dams. Yemen is also full of mountains, and had the first dam. However Yemen’s electricity will not come from dams. Yemen’s electricity will not come from Solar Photovoltaic, either, except for a few hours a day, because batteries hold at most 4 hours and are immensely expensive.

Ethiopia, on the other side of the Red Sea, is building a giant dam on the Nile. That enraged Egypt so much, at some point, it made military threats (those stopped, simply perhaps war with Ethiopia promises to be counterproductive). The fact is, the planet is dammed out. (One could build artificial lagoons and mountains to store energy as elevated water, but that would be expensive, and best done in places full of water…)

Humanity must provide for the fast-growing energy needs of poorer countries. It also needs to extend the grid to a billion people who now lack electricity. And our energy needs will only grow. One will need to more electricity to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by mid-century, and stabilize the climate (the present CO2 density has launched natural self-feeding warming mechanisms with a life of their own…)

***

Pinker and company now proclaiming the truth about nuclear power, of all places, in the New York Times (those knowing the NYT will appreciate the U-turn!):

“Where will this gargantuan amount of carbon-free energy come from? The popular answer is renewables alone, but this is a fantasy. Wind and solar power are becoming cheaper, but they are not available around the clock, rain or shine, and batteries that could power entire cities for days or weeks show no sign of materializing any time soon. Today, renewables work only with fossil-fuel backup.

Germany, which went all-in for renewables, has seen little reduction in carbon emissions, and, according to our calculations, at Germany’s rate of adding clean energy relative to gross domestic product, it would take the world more than a century to decarbonize, even if the country wasn’t also retiring nuclear plants early.”

***

One must with renewables is storage. But this massive storage we do not have yet in the present state of technology (but for a few dams where water can be lifted and turbined back down). Batteries are extremely far from being able to provide that mass storage, for months at a time (there are possible possibilities, for the future, but we aren’t there yet)…

There is only one way to store renewable energy which is affordable, and expendable on a huge scale : the hydrogen economy. That hydrogen economy has not been developed massively, yet. Although it’s feasible. It could be used in planes… This is the only way, in the foreseeable future, to get 100% CLEAN planes.

The hydrogen economy is so feasible, that the first thing Obama did, on the first day, arriving in the White House, was to destroy it, so that his friends in the fossil industry could prosper. And prosper they did… And reward him and his family, thereafter. Hey, Obama is a family man. So fracking and bituminous sands prospered , and the ill-informed populace bleated its approval, as Obama made plenty of seductive ecological noises, while hyenas laughed in the night.  

***

So what energy source are we left with, if we want to decarbonize? Nuclear energy.

Fission now, which could be rendered rather innocuous, if Thorium reactors were developed. Fusion soon, which could bring reactors connected to the grid in ten years, if massive spending was engaged. Fusion brings neglectable pollution, and not at all if using Helium 3.  

The pseudo ecologists who refuse nuclear energy refuse the earth and the sky. In the core of the planet, a fission reactor generate plate tectonic and the magnetic shield which made life possible (by controlling CO2 and radiation). In the sky, that thermonuclear reactor known as the sun.

A further complicating factor is that massive ecological disruption always bring war.

Pseudo ecologists refusing nuclear energy condemn the biosphere to the Sixth Mass Extinction. They are the objective accomplices of fossil fuel fanatics. Just their propaganda angle is different. Instead of just being greedy to no end like the fossil fuel fanatics, anti-nuclear “ecologists” are, on top of that, completely irrational.

Anti-nuclear pseudo-ecologists do to reason what Jihadists do to faith in God.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Let me quote Pinker and Al in the Times again: such sweet revenge, I have been saying these things forever, and been called devil incarnated for them… By repeating them, I repeat myself…

Pinker and Al: Nuclear made France and Sweden clean:

…”we actually have proven models for rapid decarbonization with economic and energy growth: France and Sweden. They decarbonized their grids decades ago and now emit less than a tenth of the world average of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour. They remain among the world’s most pleasant places to live and enjoy much cheaper electricity than Germany to boot.

They did this with nuclear power. And they did it fast, taking advantage of nuclear power’s intense concentration of energy per pound of fuel. France replaced almost all of its fossil-fueled electricity with nuclear power nationwide in just 15 years; Sweden, in about 20 years. In fact, most of the fastest additions of clean electricity historically are countries rolling out nuclear power.

This is a realistic solution to humanity’s greatest problem. Plants built 30 years ago in America, as in France, produce cheap, clean electricity, and nuclear power is the cheapest source in South Korea. The 98 U.S. reactors today provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity generation. So why don’t the United States and other countries expand their nuclear capacity? The reasons are economics and fear.

New nuclear power plants are hugely expensive to build in the United States today. This is why so few are being built. But they don’t need to be so costly. The key to recovering our lost ability to build affordable nuclear plants is standardization and repetition…”

***

Worldwide CO2 emissions went down as China opened several new giant nuclear reactors(one French designed, but made so much faster than the French in Finland and France, that it is the only such EPR in use!). Pinker and Al.:

“France has two types of reactors and hundreds of types of cheese, in the United States it’s the other way around. In recent decades, the United States and some European countries have created ever more complicated reactors, with ever more safety features in response to public fears. New, one-of-a-kind designs, shifting regulations, supply-chain and construction snafus and a lost generation of experts (during the decades when new construction stopped) have driven costs to absurd heights.

These economic problems are solvable. China and South Korea can build reactors at one-sixth the current cost in the United States. With the political will, China could replace coal without sacrificing economic growth, reducing world carbon emissions by more than 10 percent.”

***

Nuclear Power is safer, and less polluting, even when one is talking about second generation nuclear fission plants (now fourth generations plants are developed… Thorium would still be something else, much less polluting…). Pinker and Al.:

“All this, however, depends on overcoming an irrational dread among the public and many activists. The reality is that nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used. Mining accidents, hydroelectric dam failures, natural gas explosions and oil train crashes all kill people, sometimes in large numbers, and smoke from coal-burning kills them in enormous numbers, more than half a million per year.

By contrast, in 60 years of nuclear power, only three accidents have raised public alarm: Three Mile Island in 1979, which killed no one; Fukushima in 2011, which killed no one (many deaths resulted from the tsunami and some from a panicked evacuation near the plant); and Chernobyl in 1986, the result of extraordinary Soviet bungling, which killed 31 in the accident and perhaps several thousand from cancer, around the same number killed by coal emissions every day. (Even if we accepted recent claims that Soviet and international authorities covered up tens of thousands of Chernobyl deaths, the death toll from 60 years of nuclear power would still equal about one month of coal-related deaths.)

Nuclear power plants cannot explode like nuclear bombs, and they have not contributed to weapons proliferation, thanks to robust international controls: 24 countries have nuclear power but not weapons, while Israel and North Korea have nuclear weapons but not power.

Nuclear waste is compact — America’s total from 60 years would fit in a Walmart — and is safely stored in concrete casks and pools, becoming less radioactive over time. After we have solved the more pressing challenge of climate change, we can either burn the waste as fuel in new types of reactors or bury it deep underground. It’s a far easier environmental challenge than the world’s enormous coal waste, routinely dumped near poor communities and often laden with toxic arsenic, mercury and lead that can last forever.”

***

Misinformation, intellectual laziness, and Pluto engineered tribal hatred explain the distaste for nuclear energy. People love to hate. When one is not officially a racist and hater of low lives, one has to invent new hatreds, and hatred for nuclear energy ecology comes, ready to wear. Pinker and Al:

“Despite its demonstrable safety, nuclear power presses several psychological buttons. First, people estimate risk according to how readily anecdotes like well-publicized nuclear accidents pop into mind. Second, the thought of radiation activates the mind-set of disgust, in which any trace of contaminant fouls whatever it contacts, despite the reality that we all live in a soup of natural radiation. Third, people feel better about eliminating a single tiny risk entirely than minimizing risk from all hazards combined. For all these reasons, nuclear power is dreaded while fossil fuels are tolerated, just as flying is scary even though driving is more dangerous.

Opinions are also driven by our cultural and political tribes. Since the late 1970s, when No Nukes became a signature cause of the Green movement, sympathy to nuclear power became, among many environmentalists, a sign of disloyalty if not treason.”

The hilarious, and very telling, part, personally, is that I was an early anti-nuclear activist… on some specific type of reactors (Plutonium surgenerators… I am FOR Thorium surgenerators, though…)

***

And Pinker and Al. to conclude:

“Protecting the environment and lifting the developing world out of poverty are progressive causes. And the millennials and Gen Z’s might rethink the sacred values their boomer parents have left unexamined since the Doobie Brothers sang at the 1979 No Nukes concert.

If the American public and politicians can face real threats and overcome unfounded fears, we can solve humanity’s most pressing challenge and leave our grandchildren a bright future of climate stability and abundant energy. We can dispatch, once and for all, the self-fulfilling prophesy that we’re cooked.”

There are lots of things which could have been done, since Sparta, financed by Persia attacked Athens in the Peloponnesian war, nearly 25 centuries ago. Hence many catastrophes, the worst of them all the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization which started with the condemnable Aristotle, and ended with a flood of barbarian tribes going through the Frankish military curtain at the Winter Solstice of 406 CE (nearly three-quarters of a millennium later).  Yes, bad philosophy was in the driver’s seat:

ARISTOTLE DESTROYED DEMOCRACY

This time, though, collapse will be faster, fiercer… and nuclear bombs will be used. Thus it would be wiser to use nuclear energy in a civil manner….

Could We Colonize Mars?

Yes. There are no show stoppers. The main problem is how to get there fast, cheap and safe. That, in turn is an energy source problem. We need to go beyond chemical rockets (which were invented in China nearly a millennium ago).

Mars is a tempting prize. Mars colonization will double the extent of land humanity live on. Indeed the Red Planet is endowed with nearly as much surface area as all of Earth’s land surface combined (145 million square kilometers for Mars, 149 x 10^6 sqkm for Earth’s continents).

Mars’ rotation axis, over the eons, wobbles impressively. Right now, it’s half way (same inclination as Earth’s). But when the axis is fully inclined, my bet is that the poles melt. Then Mars has got to become much warmer, and wetter: the atmosphere would be full of H2O, water, a powerful greenhouse gas. Maybe life blossoms. Hence Mars is even more interesting than it presently looks (one could imagine life adapted to these super-summers).

Smaller, But Inhabitable Even Before Terraforming

 

Could we conquer the seas instead? Sure, we have to. However, it’s more difficult. How could it be more difficult to conquer the ocean? The average terrestrial ocean is 3,688 meters deep. This means that we have to handle, to live there, a pressure difference of 370 atmospheres. On Mars, as it is, the pressure is 1% of one atmosphere; that is just one atmosphere difference. A light spacesuit can handle Mars. But just going down 20 meters in Earth’s sea doubles the pressure problem we have on Mars.

Radiation on Mars, and getting there, is a problem: a year stay, with the trip, would augment the probability of getting cancer by 5%. NASA, and radiation workers’ limit is 3%. The average smoker doubles his cancer habit from his gaseous drug habit. Thus, by only sending smokers to Mars, and thus preventing them to smoke (the fuel debris smokers smoke clog air filters), one would vastly diminish their probability of them getting cancer.

The problem with Mars is how to get there. Getting in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is already (very) difficult, expensive, chancy, and will stay so, barring huge advances in material science. We need better engines, better airframes, and, or, a space elevator. Work is going on, in a number of ways, from perfecting launching rockets from planes, to airbreathing reaction engines, to the simple Ariane 6 solution of switching to solid rockets (French and American ballistic missiles are 100% dependable, as they sit in submarines stuffed with thermonuclear bombs).

Some hope that space tourism (one day in LEO for $50,000, say) will provide incentives for cheaper ways to leave Earth. Maybe, but university departments working on materials built atom by atom, better get lots of money (such materials, for example nanomaterials such as graphene, can be hundreds of times stronger than steel; we need to make them work on a large scale).

Given energy, rocket fuel can be made on Mars in a number of ways. Thus, plenty of energy, plenty of fuel. There is plenty of water on Mars (the Curiosity rover found between 2% and 3% in the soil). At least, at the poles (and perhaps all over). Some universities are already bioengineering mosses and other plants to survive on Mars.

With existing technology, and materials, we (or, rather, robots) could build a Space Elevator on Mars. So Mars could turn into a very convenient outpost, while terraforming proceeds.

To get to Mars fast, and to have the plenty of energy we need there to fuel robots, which, in turn, will be able to dig in the ground and make vast caverns and the like (etc.), we need a concentrated energy source.

The only one imaginable energy source would be from small thermonuclear reactors. A number of companies and universities are working on these.

There should be a crash program  on these (while pursuing steadily ITER).

Mars had life and an ocean, for probably at least a billion years. Not having a core nuclear reactor, hence a protecting magnetic field and plate tectonic, Mars lost liquid water, warmth and most of its atmosphere (Venus has the same problem, although Earth sized). Mars is waiting the human touch to smile with exuberant life again. Colonization can expand diversity as it most often does (will cynics add perfidiously). Besides, a Mars polis would be an insurance policy.

The only way to not being able to colonize Mars? If civilization collapses first, it won’t happen. Unlikely? This is exactly where abusing fossil fuels is leading us.

Patrice Ayme’

EINSTEIN’S ERROR: The Multiverse

In 1905, his so-called Wonder Year, Albert Einstein presented a theory of the photoelectric effect. The new idea came in just two lines. However I boldly claim that Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, although gloriously correct, was also, below the Nobel-winning surface, crucially wrong. A photoelectric truth covering a grievous localization lie. It was Einstein’s Greatest Error. Quantum Field Theory implicitly contradicts Einstein, by replacing particles with fields, that is, delocalizing them.

I claim that Einstein talked too much. His intuition was not careful enough, and too tied up with old fashion particles. Quantum Mechanics, one of the inventors Einstein was, questioned the very nature of elementary particles. Einstein imposed, at the outset, a solution, which, I claim, was erroneous.

What Einstein ought to have said is that electromagnetic energy was absorbed in packets of energy hf (h was Planck’s Constant, f the frequency of the light). That explained immediately the photoelectric effect. It was just enough to explain the photoelectric effect.

My Intuition Is More Informed Than Yours

***

PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT EXPLAINED SOLELY AS RECEPTION QUANTIZATION:

An electron receiving energy from light, receives a packet hf. If f is too small, the electron cannot be emitted: the electron needed some energy, say A, to escape the material. One needs hf > A.

Nor can an electron just pile up energy from light until the stored energy exceeded A. Why? Because energy is RECEIVED in such packets, and only these packets. It was hf, or nothing.

That explanation of the photoelectric effect was both necessary and SUFFICIENT. Such an explanation is exactly the symmetric statement of the one made by Planck in 1900.

(Planck did much more than that, he had to invent his constant, and it is astounding that he did not explain the photoelectric effect, as he had done 99% of the work).

Should Einstein have said what I said, he would have explained the photoelectric effect, instead of putting all of physics on an erroneous path.

***

EINSTEIN LOCALIZATION, AN ERRONEOUS HYPOTHESIS:

However, Einstein instead said something prophetic he had no reason to proffer.

Here is Einstein statement from 1905, translated from German:

“Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.”

[I emphasized what I view as the grievously erroneous part.]

With Planck’s E = hf, this is what gave Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. So not only Einstein got it wrong, but so did the Nobel committee.

(Planck objected strenuously, because he never meant for the Electro-Magnetic field to be quantized outside the blackbody cavity. I agree about quantization upon reception, as that explanation works. My objection is that Einstein had no proof of what he advanced about LOCALIZATION.)

Einstein claimed that light is made of “quanta localized at points in space, moving without dividing”. Thus, Einstein invented elementary particles. Einstein had no reason for of this fabrication, whatsoever, and did not need it, as I said.

***

THE POISONOUS WAVE-EIGENSTATE SALAD:

Fast forward thirty years. By then, thanks to the likes of Dirac (inventor of Quantum Electro Dynamics, who stumbled on Cartan’s Spinor Space and Antimatter) and Von Neumann (Functional Analysis maven), etc. the Quantum formalism had been sculpted like Mount Rushmore in the mountains of natural philosophy.

The formalism consisted in claiming that the elementary particles invented by Albert were vectors in a (Hilbert) space whose basis was made of the possible results of the experiment E.

The mathematics worked well.

However, IF Einstein’s initial invention was false, so was the picture of reality it conveyed.

And indeed, as we saw, Einstein had no reason to claim what he did: he violated Newton’s “Hypotheses Non Fingo” (“I do not FABRICATE hypotheses”… my translation).

Isaac Newton: …”I do not fabricate hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.”

***

DEMOLISHING THE MULTIVERSE ERROR:

Galileo, to expose his ideas more pedagogically, set-up a trialogue, between “Simplicius” and two others (one being Galileo himself).

I pursue my exposition of what those who believe in the Multiverse cannot dare to articulate, as it would expose their utter confusion, and more:

Simplicius: So you say that Einstein fabricated localized Quanta, out of his fertile imagination, and that axiom wrecked all of physics?

Patrice Ayme: Exactly. I would prefer to call it not fertile, but obsolete, imagination. After Einstein had fabricated his seemingly innocuous hypothesis, the localized elementary particle, the next step was to identify it with the wave function.

Simplicius: Do you not insist that the world is mostly made of Quantum Waves?

PA: Yes but “Wave Functions” are just fist order approximations of “Quantum Waves”. “Wave Functions” cannot be real, they are mathematical artefacts.

Simplicius: How come?

PA: Wave functions are made of end states, the so-called eigenvectors, the end products of experiments. That makes wave functions intrinsically teleological, made up of the future. You may as well identify human beings to their tombstones, that’s how they end up.

Simplicius: What is the connection with the Multiverse?

PA: Wave functions are intrinsically multiversal, they are made by adding different outcomes, as if they all happened. But only one can ever happen, in the end. However, when in flight, we are been told that (Einstein’s) localized particle is made of as many pieces of universes as there are eigenstates.

Simplicius: So you conclude that Einstein’s localized quantum hypothesis plus the basic Quantum Formalism implies that the simplest elementary particle is made of pieces of different universes that will happen in the future?

PA: Exactly. Einstein, in conjunction with the Hilbert formalism, invented the Multiverse. This is what Everett observed, and, at the time, it made the inventors of Quantum Mechanics (minus Planck and Einstein) so uncomfortable that Everett was booted out of theoretical physics, an even his adviser Wheeler turned against him.

Simplicius: But did not Einstein demonstrate with the EPR thought experiment that “elements of reality” could not be localized?

PA: Exactly. With a little help from Karl Popper, maybe. Entanglement has been experimentally shown to not be localizable with the metric used in General Relativity. So light quanta themselves not only are not points, something that was obvious all along, sorry Einstein, but also, the speed of light is an emerging metric for the Universe.

It has been a conspiracy all along.

Simplicius: Conspiracy?

PA: Yes, there is a famous mistake in Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. He insists that a photon interfere only with itself. That is demonstrably false (radio interference and independent lasers playing double slit). Dirac had to say that to NOT make the Quantum Waves themselves the main actors.

Simplicius: Why would physicists conspire to push false physics?

PA: Because, if they admit that their physics is false, and have nothing better to propose, they are losing status. (Whereas I improve mine by showing why they are wrong.)

Another point is that the “Multiverse” is suitably mysterious and absurd to impress common people. It is obviously the greatest miracle imaginable, so those who have penetrated this secrecy are very great men.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

We saw Einstein’s hypothesis of localization led to the Multiverse. As the Multiverse is unacceptable, so is the localization hypothesis.

But we already knew this in several ways (diffraction, 2-slit, and other non-local wave effects; plus EPR style experiments, let alone the QM formalism itself, which also predicts non-localization).

The intuition of the real sub-quantic theory depends, in part, on such facts.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S (2021); In one sentence: The multiverse theory comes from a nefarious cognitive interference between Einstein’s unproven theory of momentum-energy pointwise localism with the nonlocal nature of (quantum) dynamics.

Non-Conservation Of Energy & Multiverse Madness

Before unreason took over physics, one of the major principles was energy conservation. However, this was before. Now Sean Carroll, following other Multiversists (as I call them insolently) crucially depend upon nonconservation of energy.

Sean wrote an article, short and to the point: “Energy is not conserved.”

Well written, indeed. Carroll glibly asserts that “see, it was not so hard” (to throw away the most fundamental principle of physics, energy conservation).

Galactic Cluster Focuses Blue Galaxy Light

All the blue blotches are images of a far-away galaxy, which are focused by the cluster of galaxies in front. By the way, both Newtonian Theory and Einstein Theory predict the deviation of light by matter (more so with Einstein, as time slows down, allowing for more time to deviate).

The Universe we have, and can see, is so immense, we can’t comprehend it. There is no need to claim there are more of them than atoms. Except if there is a need to go completely crazy (something Putin and other plutocrats are all for!)

That energy is NOT conserved is essential to enable the creation of universes at the drop of a hat.

Nothing is really true anymore, even energy is not conserved. It costs nothing to create a universe.

Next we will all be led to believe plutocrats create not just jobs, but universes.

It’s probably related. Thanks, Sean.

So take two galaxies clusters, G1 and G2. Suppose they separate from the expansion of the universe. Sean Carroll, following the Multiverse fashion, asserts that it cost no energy to separate said galaxies.

Then he has a photon P travelling from G1 to G2, and he sees it has lost energy, so energy is not conserved. Multiversists repeat this argument ad nauseam.

In truth, what they stumbled upon is that the definition of mass-energy in the Theory of Gravitation is not clear. That’s all. The difficulty has been known for generations of mathematicians (behind closed doors). However, it does not mean that physics reduces to dust.

It just means one has to go back to Riemann’s intuition of the 1860s, and reconsider it carefully. Riemann tried to reduce force to geodesic separation. I would suggest to reduce energy to a function related to geodesics density. As geodesics separate, energy is put in the system. With this notion, the fact that it costs nothing to create a universe disappear. https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/quantum-trumps-spacetime/

Physicists can’t reduce the universe just to physics, physics has to reduce to mathematics, too, at least in part.

One may wonder what the Multiversists reduce physics to. Apparently, having done away with energy conservation, a fundamental axiom, they replace it by universe creation. They reduce all of physics to the creation of universes.

Dark Energy, the accelerated expansion of the universe, questions the entire scheme of present day cosmology, let alone physics. Starting the conversation (logos) by throwing out the most sacred principle of physics (energy conservation), and replacing it with instant karma is as glib as glib gets.

Instant karma? Thanks to the alleged non-conservation of energy, the creation of trillions of universes per second per cubic meter is eminently reasonable.

Does that makes Middle –Age theology sitting angels on pinheads a plausible outcome? This is reductio ad absurdum, if I ever saw it.

Quantum Field Theorists may smirk, and accuse me of not knowing that energy is not conserved in QFT

The time-energy uncertainty relation seems indeed to allow for large energy excursions, if they happened in a short time. But that’s related to “virtual particles”, which admittedly are neither virtual, nor particles… Just resting on that would allow a universe in a length of time so short it has no meaning (because it has no clock).

Agreed, physics is hard. Agreed, today’s “Standard Model” of High Energy Physics explains only 4% of the universe.

But that’s no excuse to go crazy, and see gazillion universes on every pinhead.

That only help the crazies.

Crazy like foxes, crazy like plutocrats.

Patrice Ayme

Let’s Not Do With Putin As We Did With Hitler

Things Are Getting Serious with Vlad the Mad, Kremlin dictator:

Paul Krugman noble and Noble propagandist extraordinaire at the New York Times, was in a Dubai conference, by the elite, for the elite, plutocratizing, in denial naturally, that the world plutocracy has been leading the world to catastrophe, as usual. Kremlin tyrant Putin is pretty much a product of WEF, the World Economic Forum, or is it World Exploitation F*ck-up? And Putin has been revealing, once again, his true nature, evil-power, pluto-cracy, invading and destroying. Wrote Krugman:

“A lot of the conference was actually about geopolitics, and I don’t want to think about the quite grim stuff from that end.”

Yes, let’s not think too much, or too grimly, when things are getting interesting. This is all fun and games! It must be! Fun and game world demonstrate the seriousness of the global elites! In Lima 196 countries decided that Global Warming was a problem, and all and any country had to present a plan to reduce CO2 emissions within 6 months.

Global temperatures seem ready for a significant jump-up, the exact thing I have been saying, for more than a decade, that it would happen someday. Amusingly, at this rate, in ten years, temperature would jump as high as the worst predictions… made meekly by official scientists officially paid, regarding temperatures they feared we would enjoy… a century in the future….

The gigantic Gulf of Maine has already warmed up. It was the stronghold of cod, ever since Europeans, more than 5 centuries ago, started to massively fish there. From Boston to the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of Maine has become too hot for cods, and they vote with their fins to go somewhere fresher. At the rate we are going, cods may run out of planet within twenty years.

Back to Krugman: “Venezuela-with-nukes (Russia) keeps looking more vulnerable to crisis. Long-term interest rates at almost 13 percent, a plunging currency, and a lot of private-sector institutions with large foreign-currency debts. You might imagine that large foreign exchange reserves would allow the government to bail out those in trouble, but the markets evidently don’t think so. This is starting to look very serious.”

It is called war. War with Putin. War is serious. It’s better done early, on democracy’s own agenda, not according to the plans of the nuclear tyrant. Cratering the price of oil is part of it.

Russia’s central bank, in a bid to prevent the Ruble to turn into ruble, raised its key interest rate Tuesday, Dec. 15 2014, to 17% from 10.5%. The repo rate went up to 18%.

War with Putin, is better than the alternative, namely peace with the dictator. Fortunately, we are not following the script from January 1933 (election of Hitler) to December 1941 (Hitler declares war to the USA). During that terrible period of history, the US had betrayed democracy and its own parents, France and Britain. Now the USA is behaving in a more civilized manner…

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Hitler Blossomed Because As Assad And Putin, He Had Western Plutocratic Allies:

War with Hitler started in 1933, as far as the French Republic was concerned (and the French economy got seriously affected by the war preparations: enormous fortifications, and being ready to field more than 100 divisions).

However, all of France’s potential allies signed deals, official or not, with Hitler. Poland inaugurated this with a January “Non-Aggression Treaty with Hitler.

Great Britain signed a so-called “Naval Treaty” with Hitler in 1935, with the understanding that Hitler could invade the East as he pleased. The Treaty allowed Hitler to re-arm as much as he pleased, in violation of the Versailles Treaty.

Meanwhile American plutocrats invested massively in the Reich. Texaco provided Hitler with all the oil he needed to transport a fascist army from Africa into Spain, and wage war there. Standard Oil (Exxon) provided secretly the Nazis with synfuel technology (not to be shared with the Anglo-Saxon militaries), IBM was given the monopoly of computing in the Reich, Ford (Hitler’s first sponsor) build thousands of military vehicles, and so on ad nauseam: the Reich had turned into an Eldorado for American plutocrats.

When France (1936) declared her intention to give weapons to the Spanish Republic, she was opposed on the world scene & had to back-off. France could not afford to antagonize the Anglo-Saxons, so the Spanish Republic got no weapon, and was progressively devoured in the next three years by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and their goons.

Spain fell in 1939. Millions more Spaniards would be eliminated by the fascists in the next few years. Great Britain had not supported the French-Czech alliance, and Czechoslovakia had been invaded. Finally the UK understood how serious the situation was, and agreed to support the French-Polish Alliance’s fine print.

Hitler supported German minorities, he said, and gave an ultimatum to Poland. This time France declared her intent to declare war. So Hitler allied himself with Stalin, and invaded Poland. But France, now joined by Britain, which had no army to speak of, declared war. The British Commonwealth soon followed (Canada, Australia, India, etc.)

What did the USA do? The President of the USA, acting on the “Neutrality Act” signed a law making it unlawful for American citizens to support France or Britain, or even set a foot on their ships. Why? France and Britain were viewed as “belligerent”.

Meanwhile, American plutocratic support for Hitler augmented.

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Hitler Got Lucky In May 1940:

The rest is well known: the Nazis’ 150 divisions got lucky against the 100 French divisions in May 1940, however the French made it so that the small British army escaped at Dunkirk, and that prevented Hitler to establish a bridgehead in Britain.

Less well known is the fact that the top German generals asked Britain and the USA to simply say that they would support France. Then the generals were to get rid of the Nazis to save Germany. Instead, the British and Americans told Hitler that his generals were plotting against him (this happened in 1937-1939).

Lesson of all this?

The Anglo-Saxon support of Hitler was crucial in allowing Hitler to pursue his apocalypse…

And even encouraged it: Hitler made countless discourses about the democracies having no will.

Is Putin Hitler?

Not exactly, but Putin has nukes. And the foundations of their ideologies have a lot in common. Hitler thought that, to develop economically, Germany needed a greater “vital space” (Lebensraum). Putin has made it clear that he had to reconstitute a greater empire, the USSR

If we do not want to renew the mistakes of the 1930s, the lessons are clear:

France, Britain and the USA have to be united, and promote civilization. They are now joined by Germany, and the rest of Western Europe. The traitors of 1939, among them Sweden and Switzerland, are now firmly on the side of (greater) democracy and against blatant dictatorship (with which they had collaborated in 1939).

When the French Republic went to war against the awful troika from hell, Hitler, Stalin and American plutocrats, the odds were long. Right now, the odds are excellent: the GDP of Russia is less much less than that of France. The Russian economy is in free fall.

United We Have To Stand:

The difference with the 1930s is that, this time, the West is united. Hitler would have been killed by his own generals if the USA and Britain had been solidly behind the French Republic in the 1930s (instead the USA and Britain informed dictator-president-Kanzler Hitler that his own generals were plotting against him).

A non-difference with the present plutocracy in the West is that Moscow has the greatest number of billionaires in residence. Putin was encouraged by what plutocracy got away with in the West, and tried to go a bit further… big mistake.

Now the West has to grimly pursue the job.

In the 1930s, the war of democracy against fascism, by proxy, was in Spain. Democracy lost, fascism was encouraged. Now the show by proxy is in Syria. It’s an enormously complicated situation.

But, as I said, the (representative) democracies had to get involved. They all are: Australia is bombing Iraq. Great. All right, the mentally unbalanced supports of Islamism come out, and fire their weapons in Sydney’s harbor. Not surprising… except to those who did not read the Qur’an.

Mayhem comes from two sources: bad guys, and bad situations. They are entangled: bad guys create bad situations, bad situations create bad guys.

The ultimate bad situation is the CO2 crisis. There too the lesson is that the West has to be united (it was not united in the last two decades, as the USA pursued its own selfish CO2 splurging, namely 20 tons per person per year of CO2, more than double the EU’s; fortunately, Kerry went to Lima).

Hitler was encouraged by his Anglo-Saxon plutocrat friends to get ever worse, until the bad situation he had created escaped his control, September 3, 1939, when France and Britain declared war.

Putin had a bad situation, namely the kleptocratic plutocracy he created led Ukraine to break formally away by associating itself with the European Union. He tried to stop that with threats, and then, prisoner of its own rhetoric, and his thirst for oil, by invading Crimea, and annexing it.

It was the first unilateral annexation in Europe since Hitler annexed parts of France in 1940.

It will not stand, it cannot stand.

Let’s not do with Putin as we did with Hitler, appeasing a dictator all the way to an holocaust.

Patrice Ayme’