Completely incompetent leaders, and only them, decide what our world is. They take their little decisions in secret, among experts, unchallenged by the common sense of debate. They jet set around the planet and splurge.
Notre Dame catches fire. Where are the helicopters dumping water? Can’t have them say the experts, cathedral too fragile: a fire hotter than lava is more of a problem. Obviously an idiotic opinion (whereas planes have killed with the tons of water they suddenly dump, helicopters can be as gentle as needed: the water comes from a pail, and the pail could have filled up 100 meters away in the Seine).
The burning of Notre Dame tells us that the world’s “experts” are not what they claim to be. They are experts of routine, self-glorification, career building. Think about it: a roof with timber older than a millennium has burned. The “charpente” of Notre Dame was made of 1,300 oaks, each more than 1,000 years old. It was called “the forest”. Middle Ages engineers and firefighters took care of the cathedral, and its roof, for centuries, but their Twenty-First century alter-egos couldn’t.
Our civilization could go up in smoke even faster than that
Notre-Dame resisted 856 years, the Middle Ages, eight religious wars, the French Revolution, the Cossacks, the Franco-Prussian war, the Commune, WWI and the Kaiser’s shells, Hitler, V2s. But not Twenty-First Century arrogant incompetence! A warning for all!
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Reactions on the spot:
Fire is out of control in the North Tower of Notre Dame (“Beffroy Nord”). Nobody told me this, I saw the flames on TV. The incompetence of “experts” is astronomical. The entire cathedral may well collapse.
Water dropping helicopters should have been used. No ifs and buts. Even Trump in his White House figured that one out right away. Trump was first to react, within half an hour:
So horrible to watch the massive fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Perhaps flying water tankers could be used to put it out. Must act quickly!
“Experts” begged to differ, and replied to Trump:
Sécurité Civile Fr Hundreds of firemen of the Paris Fire Brigade are doing everything they can to bring the terrible #NotreDame fire under control. All means are being used, except for water-bombing aircrafts which, if used, could lead to the collapse of the entire structure of the cathedral.
My personal answer: That’s hogwash, you are incompetent. Helicopter dropping water from the Seine would have made a huge difference, OBVIOUSLY. You were NOT ready for the worst possible case. There is a principle for all of humanity rising with these flames: one has to be ready for the worst.
Looking at the fire progressing on the roof, it is completely obvious that water dropping copters would have mitigated the fire. It may even have helped collapsing part of the metallic cover below which the flames crawled…
Fleche collapsing
Of course, a sprinkler system would have stopped the fire right away. What do the French authorities say to this? We don’t do sprinklers in France, or something to this effect.
What has happened since Notre Dame was built, 856 years ago? Not much of planetary significance for centuries, until around 1850 CE, when the CO2 built-up stopped the Little Ice Age.
Now the entire biosphere is crumbling under various industrial assaults of humanity. We need expertise as never before. And what do we observe? Our “experts” are not up to Middle Ages standards.
Remedy? Always the same idea: publicly, transparently, thoroughly, debate, with peculiar attention to idiosyncratic ideas.
A public debate on fire security for Notre Dame (and similar buildings throughout the world) would have brought the question: why not a sprinkler system?
Sprinkler systems can release prodigious quantities of water. NASA uses water suppression to cut down rocket engine sound from 285 decibels (which would destroy everything when reverberating) to half that (142 decibels). To do this the NASA sprinkler system releases 60 tons of water… per second.
It’s not really new tech: New York skyscrapers had sprinklers, a century ago. Oh, by the way, 60 tons of water per second would have stopped the World Trade Center fires in… seconds. (So the WTC would not have collapsed; that happened because when steel is brought up to 500 degrees Celsius, it loses half of its strength… The steel in the WTC got progressively brought up to 500 C, after an hour, or so, from the burning of furniture… initiated by burning the kerosene of the planes… was there kerosene at Notre Dame? The French authorities decided, within minutes, that it was an accident, no Jihadist involved, they are like Allah, they know everything…)
Another question would have been: why not helicopters? The question was already asked for the World Trade Center.
Spaceship Earth is in the hand of “experts”, or those elected oligarchs we call politicians. The politicians are experts because they asked “experts”.
Leibnitz, probably to please his Pluto sponsors, claimed we were in the best of all possible worlds.
Well, the worst possible worlds always follow the best possible worlds. Dinosaurs won’t confirm this, but they would, if they could..
Patrice Ayme
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Notes: 1) In 1902, Rilke came to Paris to become Rodin’s secretary. Rodin was working on the “Gates of Hell”, a monument made for the entrance of the new Orsay Palace… which had been burned during the Commune of 1971. Rilke wrote:
“… because the great cities, Lord, are damned,
and the panic of fire simmers in their breasts.”
I saw Rodin’s “Gates of Hell”. even touched it, at a private Pluto event in Stanford University…
Where material wealth thrives, the art goes…
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The French state of incompetency couldn’t find money to install a sprinkler system in Notre Dame… Or in another 2,000 historical buildings in France. Another cathedral burned last year or so. In Nantes. See the picture inside:
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 