Civilization Is What’s Left After Exterminating Idiocy

Civilization rests on the supremacy of superior ideas, and the genius of human creativity to erect them for all to embrace. It is the opposite of Submission (which, disastrously, is the name of one of the major religions). 

Teaching civilization to a child then consists fundamentally into introducing the notion of superior logic, which leads to the ability of discerning superior ideas.   

Everybody is equal, some say? In mental capacity, certainly not, watch Putin or Hitler, for starters… Both idiots claimed they wanted to raise those they ruled over, although that was true only after inverting all values: madness was reason, lying was cogent, defeat was victory, terror was freedom, and life was death. Even worse, dozens of millions of complete criminal imbeciles approved this blatant inversion of all values, and enabled it. After a while, at least in Nazi Germany, the idiots kept going because they were all accomplices in unfathomable crimes.  

So there is such a thing as mass imbecility, mass criminality. I know perfectly well that a theory was invented to deny that the German people were collectively responsible for the Nazi crimes and only a few thousands of criminal Nazis had done it. But actually ALL Nazis and their enablers were criminals, and they should all have been punished.The reason for this stupid theory, of denying collective responsibility was the urge many racists felt to recycle their Nazi fellow souls after 1945. Thus some of the greatest Nazi enablers (say Generalfeldmarschalll Erich Von Manstein) were recycled, and kept a (Nazi) clamp on the reconstituted Wehrmacht (aka Bundeswehr).   

Von Manstein was Hitler’s most important enabler. In a cocktail party, the just promoted general, disrespecting the entire chain of command, went directly to Hitler, and explained to the Führer that the plans submitted to him for the attack on France, an attack through north Belgium and the Netherlands, were all bound to fail as the superior French army would anticipate this reedition of August 1914.Instead Von Manstein proposed a feint in the north, and a dash through the Ardennes low mountains in the south. The plan had been developed with the informal cooperation of Heinz Guderian, the great priest of Blitzkrieg. The reason Von Manstein was so bold is that his family, both biological and adoptive, was stuffed with some of the most famous Prussian generals of the two preceding generations.

The idea was genius, showing that even the greatest idiots, namely Hitler and Von Manstein, can stumble on genius ideas.

Never mind that Von Manstein pretty much looked like the caricature of a Jew that Nazis used to condemn to death, just for existing. It was not just appearance. Von Manstein was a biological Jew (⅛ at least) by the Nazis’ own criterions. To evade evidence, nazi racial experts decided that von manstein was a jew by religion, not race… 

But not just that. General von Manstein himself arranged a military funeral for his uncle, Avraham Ben Avraham von Manstein, a Jew.

“At that time [1944] the General [Von Manstein] had been relieved from all his military duties by Hitler. This gave him the time to organize a funeral for his uncle during one of World War II most difficult periods. The funeral was held with full military ceremony, the coffin was draped with Nazi swastika flag and the military escort detachment was made of uniformed SS soldiers.”

How much more idiotic can one get? SS burying a Jew with honors? Or was it a preparation to what happened next: Von Manstein tried to escape punishment in 1945 by testifying against his Nazi comrades. 

But then various tidbits surfaced: During the Crimean campaign Manstein was directly involved in atrocities against the Soviet population, especially those committed by Einsatzgruppe D, one of several Schutzstaffel (SS) groups that had been tasked with the elimination of the Jews of Europe. When a subordinate officer was alarmed by the mass assassinations of civilians, Manstein told him not to worry about it. 

Manstein was tried, found guilty of war crimes in 1949, condemned to 12 years, served 4, and then became a trusted and topmost adviser of the German government. He was careful to discredit the officers who had resisted Hitler… who only got justly honored after he released his grip. 

[The case of Von Manstein was not unique: the top marshall who conquered Norway for Hitler, and committed atrocities there was a Jew (Hitler “aryanized” him)That they were several top Nazi enablers who were Jews should not be construed as an approbation of Putin’s servants claiming that Ukraine is led by Nazi-Jews…]

***

Nazi, top Hitler enabler, and Jew: what could be more idiotic?

***

I grew up in some of the poorest countries on Earth. My father was born in Algeria… but was highly educated (he became a professional geologist after being admitted to the highest MBA style school).

I learned early on, in my first decade, that the intellectual abilities of people varied immensely. I found some of the witchcraft and cannibalistic culture I was exposed to in the depths of Black Africa pretty stupid, although the introduction of Islam, a religion from the white world, surprisingly represented in some ways a drastic setback… especially in regards to the female condition.

I also found a lot of Euro-Americans incredibly idiotic and arrogant, representing well an unreal culture (which has matured into some of the excesses of wokism… and pacifism/Putinism).

So, culturally we are not all equal. Some, most are truly unequal. If someone doesn’t know calculus, or more simply, the exponential function, they will have to be introduced quickly to them when the notions become indispensable to the logic deployed. The allegedly idiotic Socrates may have thought that everybody knew mathematics (so said Plato!)… but he was completely wrong.

No exponential, no true understanding of planetary boundaries, or of the knife edge on which civilization is presently dancing.

Looking back at the Maya, some thinkers there and then, probably saw the catastrophe coming… after all it had happened before, and the safeguards had been put in place by ancestors, for excellent reasons. However, low culture Maya decided to discard the wisdom of ages, and the Mayan civilization completely cratered.

A similar disaster on a planetary scale is foreseeable and imminent. To avoid it, we need to be smart. To be smart the notion of idiocy needs to be revived and extolled: most of the present policies to alleviate Earth Boundaries are idiotic, because counterproductive… For example, nuclear fusion, not electric cars, should have got the greatest public funding: ITER was slowed down ten years to make the money flow towards ITER from the US and other actors more palatable… officially speaking. In truth the fossil fuel industry was behind the defunding of fusion research. 

An example of idiocy: the French government expects a reduction of overall energy usage of a third by 2035. That’s obviously crazy… and pointless: France is not causing the CO2 crisis. Policies like that insure the restoration of fossil fuel friendly governance… If elections are conducted fairly (a big if!)

All bad all over? No. SpaceX, exploding ever bigger rockets, has obviously the Pentagon discreetly behind it…. So stars, here we come. It could be worse. Namely total anti-tech, anti-science wokism, Maya style, ruling all over.

The Mayas didn’t recover: what their civilization needed to rebound, they had destroyed (not just their hydraulic works, but species of trees they depended upon for construction). When the Conquistadores showed up, more than five centuries after the collapse, the Maya, what was left of them, lived along the coast, in scattered shadows of their old civilization, with a very small fraction of the population they used to have. Most of Yucatan, once cultivated and a vast garden, had returned to wilderness.

Patrice Ayme

Our civilization, which is in imminent mortal danger, will not recover either if stupidity is not put on the run.

I I think, therefore I discern… Mentally superior from mentally inferior…

Patrice Ayme

Refusing To Vaccinate: Are Our Experts Homicidal Cretins? Or Just Corrupt? Drunk On Power?

The Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine passed its class III trial with flying colors, more than 95% success rate (no symptoms, and basically no grave case of COVID). It was then authorized on an emergency basis. Forty millions doses were expected to be produced by the end of 2020. However 20 million doses were kept in reserve.

Why? To make sure the elite gets its second shot, thus superb immunity? We were indeed told that it was to make sure that there would be enough second doses a month later. The reasoning is, at best, idiotic: as production is ramping up, there certainly would be enough doses a month or two later. Actually the head of research and development at Pfizer, a woman, said exactly what I just said (but she has to be discrete).

Come to think of it, that reasoning, that shots have to be kept in reserve, is so blatantly idiotic it cannot be the truth. The Class III trial of that vaccine has shown that considerable protection from COVID appears after just ten days of the first dose (quickly around more than 50%, more than the flu vaccine). Presumably the “experts” had time to get informed of this significant fact. Although I suspect that they spend so much time with celebrities, plutocrats and power types or their stockbrokers, that they perhaps do not have enough time to read the latest science. (Not kidding: the esteemed Dr. Fauci had time for Kim Kardashian and no less than 36 hollywood and rapping celebrities; he was against banning travel, before he was for it, and against masks, before he was for them; hey, jumping all around like an illogical goat helps his fame…)

A friend of mine who is a top lawyer told me half the doses were kept in reserve to make sure that the 1%, the power brokers, the elite of politics, wealth and celebritism had enough vaccine to flaunt its privilege. 

More prosaically, why do some individuals aspire to so much power over others? Simply because that tells us, and them, how much more valuable those individuals are: they are worth saving and we are not. Their lives are so much more worthy. Let them have vaccines, while we do not. They are our gods, we shall pray at their feet, while they prey on us.

Watch, in places such as California, thirty-something teachers, who are paid full time, not to teach, because their unions refuse to teach, getting priority for COVID vaccinations. 

Kamala Harris and her husband, both 56 years old, are superior beings: they should get a vaccine they need 1,000 times less than an older person, who will then not get it, because the old and common do not deserve to live, but she does. You the commons, have to learn to be a worm with a smile…

US Vice President (“elect”) Kamala Harris is in perfect health, and 56 years old. She, and her 56 years old husband, received the coronavirus vaccine. People more than 65 years old, have 90 times higher probability of dying from COVID, & are not getting the vaccine, while relatively young super healthy politicians get it. Equality for all to see. We The People die, while our dictators do their best efforts to live, and flaunt it!

Friend Vikki Stefans objected: “She’s in Congress with a bunch of goofballs who attend unmasked WH parties though. I’d say the exposure risk is pretty high and the leadership example matters too. She DID let Joe go first!!”

Patrice Ayme replied:

The leadership of flaunting privilege? I know a high density living place with more than two thousand residents with a COVID outbreak. Many individuals therein are aged more than 80 years old. I asked several local authorities to get vaccinations authorized. They ignored my request: city hall said they did not worry about such things. The County Health Officer, prone to issue fascist orders of the nonsensical type, replied they had lots of requests… But my request was on behalf of the largest high rise in the entire 1.6 million inhabitant county, a Silicon Valley county full of single family homes with a median price above a million dollar. 

So twenty-five year old teachers who refuse to teach, and are living in single homes, are getting vaccinated, though. Half a mile away a high density situation just saw five hundred forty (540) COVID cases out of 540 residents, some elderly. No vaccines, a few deaths already. I say Ms Harris is the example of privilege, as is her privileged Big Law partner husband.

They show that the elite considers it important to tell us that they deserve to live, and we do not. Why is it so important? Because it is unfair, so it invites We The People to think of the guillotine. A conflict is created, and conflicts keep the otherwise mentally vacuous busy, providing a distraction from their ambulatory nihilism.

Patrice Ayme 

***

***

I suggested a few weeks ago to do only the first shots. Now Great Britain just opted for the common sense policy. From the New York Times:

Britain became the first country on Wednesday to give emergency authorization to the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, opening a path for a cheap and easy-to-store shot that much of the world will rely on to help end the pandemic.

In a bold decision to accelerate vaccinations, a British government advisory body directed clinicians to give as many people as possible their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, without reserving supplies for planned second doses.

Instead of administering the two shots within a month, clinicians will wait as long as 12 weeks to give people their second doses, the government said, a decision that applies to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech shot that Britain authorized early this month.

With the vaccination rollout moving slowly in both Britain and the United States, British officials were heeding calls to delay the second doses as a way of giving more people the partial protection of a single dose. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said people would start receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine early next week.

…

The Oxford-AstraZeneca shot is poised to become the world’s dominant form of inoculation. At $3 to $4 a dose, it is a fraction of the cost of some other vaccines. And it can be shipped and stored at normal refrigeration temperatures for six months, rather than in the ultracold freezers required by rival vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, making it easier to administer to people in poorer and harder-to-reach parts of the world.

When given in two, full-strength doses, AstraZeneca’s vaccine showed 62 percent efficacy in clinical trials — considerably lower than the roughly 95 percent efficacy achieved by Pfizer and Moderna’s shots. For reasons scientists don’t yet understand, AstraZeneca’s vaccine showed 90 percent efficacy in a smaller group of volunteers who were given a half-strength initial dose.

[The latter point needs to be demonstrated with certainty… but is plausible…]

In Britain, Professor David Salisbury, formerly responsible for the country’s immunization program, has campaigned to delay the second shot until all high-risk people have had the first dose. After two weeks of declining infections, new cases have risen sharply in the U.K. since the beginning of December, apparently in part from a mutation making the virus 56% more transmissible.

On December 22, former long term U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair said that proceeding with the previously planned second-shot schedule would result in “colossal” damage in terms of infection rates, deaths and economic impact.

Idiots Say: “Idiocy Is Great!”

They are “young”, a fleeting notion in humans, and they scoff:”I want to go out and have fun! Why should I care that a few old folks may die?” Fun? What fun? Why at happened to the struggle against Nazism? Was not that a struggle to cancel those who wanted to help “natural selection” and kill whom they viewed as the weak? What do those “young” mean by “fun”? Is killing old people fun, then? Getting together and inebriating, namely drugging their brains out of commission? OK, I admit that if I had a brain as deranged as theirs, I would probably try to shut it down using alcohol, marihuana, opiates, glues and what not, too!

In France, one of their own, one of these “young”, described as a party girl, died from COVID 19. She was 16. In California a teen, age 14, died. In Illinois, Cook County, a ten month old infant died. A principal of a school, not even 40 years old, died in New York.

OK, easy for me to say: I was never a party girl, or a party animal. Why? Out of self-respect for my mind, which has always spurned mobs, and herd thinking (speaking of herd, how is that “herd immunity” working for you, you the COVID, Boris Johnson? Your government was idiotically promoting “herd immunity“, two weeks ago… Conclusion: COVID exploded in the UK. That it exploded in France for the same reason, weeks earlier, is not excuse…)   

So tell me, brainless youth scofflaws who think death and suffering happens only to others? “What is the difference between you and young Nazis? Young Nazis also wanted to have fun, gathering, flocking, and bellowing, all together.”

The “youth” is not smart, because the “youth” has been brainwashed to admire brainless plutocrats such as muscle man Kobe Bryant… Bryant was notorious to fly all around, despising climate and people. Well, fog killed him… But he dragged children in his death. Actually I know 40 something lawyer who claimed she had the worst day in her life when Kobe died. She was crying all over Facebook. What about Kobe’s 13 year old daughter, and her friend on the same flight?

A week ago, I met a flock of twenty-somethings on top of a hill in a park. They were going up as a tight group, two dozens of them, talking loud. They were abreast of a fire road, I squeezed along them, up wind (because I am smart). One of them said aloud:”And they tell us if we cough here, they will die down there in the valley!” They all laughed. The first houses were several miles away.

Result? The Bay Area parks parking lots were ordered closed yesterday.

This is of course a fleeting moment: soon the “youth” will see the error of their ways, if they don’t already.

***

Want an example of scientific idiocy? Consider other scientists and media hacks trashing the research of superstar professor Didier Raoult. Here are examples:

“Raoult’s critics have pointed to problems with the protocol of his testing and worrying side effects of the drug… At least one person has already died in the US after self-medicating with a non-pharmaceutical version of the drug used for cleaning fish tanks.”

Both statements are commonly reproduced all over the same idiotic media which was trashing Trump as racist and keen to distract from impeachment, after he called a public health emergency and closed the border to China, January 31… and idiotic. The product to clean aquariums is a chemical combination with phosphate, made to kill all life. Of course, if one swallows it, one dies. The “side effects” of “the drug” are nothing. I took both drugs many times and for quite a long time, both to fight malaria and pneumonia. My mom had a heart problem, perhaps in part for using quinine, but she used it for ten years, both for malaria and another medical condition. This being said, right, quinine can attack the cardiac muscle. 

The idiocy of such comments show the hatred bias of those who proffer them. Another common barb at Raoult is that his studies are “observational”, not “double blind”. But actually Raoult had controls (2 groups outside of his 24 patients; now he has an 80 patients study out, same results). 

Unphased by the clamoring negativists full of hatred, Trump requisitioned sixteen million (16 x 10^6) doses of hydroxychloroquine from three pharmaceutical companies (March 30, 2020 press conference). Contrarily to what the rabid anti-Trumpers have been claiming, the evidence that this Raoult drug works is great (and dates more than a decade).

***

Idiots love idiocy. This love for idiocy is often the main reason why they’re idiots. Pointing out idiocies to idiots, who are idiots by choice and will, make them more idiotic, because they crave idiocy, and want to splurge. 

Where does this love for idiocy come from? Laziness is a big factor; thinking is hard, energetically expensive, because it’s expensive to reorganize one’s brain neural networks

Idiots don’t just find intelligence more expensive that they can afford, they hate intelligence, and that entices them to become ever more idiotic: idiots are smart enough to feel that idiocy is the greatest remedy to that intelligence they are unable to experience!

Honorable commenter Ronald Scheckelhoff observes: “I think that in some cases the mechanics of untruth are machinated by lies, but in other cases by disinterest, and in still other cases by ignorance, so it’s quite a stew of causes that’s driving the current crop of bad decisions.”

Laziness is indeed an important driver of generalized stupidity. Thinking is hard, entertainment easy. That’s why people prefer to admire Kobe, a basketball player, a ethically corrupt, not so gentle man, who had his family fly in pea soup so thick police helicopters were grounded, and cars could only be driven very slowly. Ethically corrupt? He got children killed, flying in that pea soup: the helicopter couldn’t land, too much fog, it was put on a holding pattern. 

The arrogant Kobe had been well-known, for a decade, for flying all over, spitting on We The People and common sense. Several media production made fun of him that way. That was so well known, a video cartoon was produced in which Kobe crashed in his helicopter, but still had a bad attitude even after the crash, pulling his tongue out while clutching his trophies…

***

Kobe was an ethical disaster, a model exactly of not what to follow, precisely because he was not smart. This demonstrates, not that this was necessary, that basketball stars don’t have to be smart. No elementary thinking is necessary in this activity, to be a tremendous success making the females juice up, and the teens hope they get lucky too… But then the question is why are such idiots brandished as what the youth should emulate? No wonder, then that the “youth” think it’s OK to kill everybody (else). 

Suggesting that whom, and what, one admires or is fascinated by, is an ethical problem may sound to some as far fetched. But actually the notion is not new, and was implicit in many past ethical systems (for example Judeo-Christo-Islamism).

Want a better world? 

Start with better role models to adulate, and thus, emulate. And better fields to admire, and long to contribute to. We need to understand biology better, not to refine the art of oversized specimens apt to put the ball into baskets.

Patrice Ayme

Brexit Idiocy In One Picture

Hard core Brexit idiots pontificate that they will renew their ties with the British Commonwealth and the USA. As if the quaint British monarchy imported from the Netherlands had anything in common with the hyper violent, domineering American republic, a country of immigrants, a world country, the world’s hyper power, which can purchase anything… but a soul, and a past it is ready to admit it had. The proud British are, relatively speaking, Europeans, and they don’t even know it.

Here is the European situation, the web of relationships, with the spider in the center, depicted with the most basic mathematics, set theory. I present to you the spider and the fly:

The Situation Is Even More Complicated Than That: Switzerland, For Example, Has More Than 600 “Bilateral” Treaties With The European Union, And Has To Respect Free Circulation Of European Citizens.

[Nota Bene: the GDP numbers above, due to the tremendous immigration of people and capital into the United Kingdom, the UK, due to the laxity of France and Germany, brought an extreme overvaluation of the British Pound, and a swelling of all things British. This house of cards is collapsing: British GDP has now shrunk below French GDP, in barely more than two weeks…]

Switzerland voted against the Free Circulation Of European Citizens, including Croatians, in winter 2014. Some sanctions were applied by the EU on an aghast Switzerland, the next day. However, Switzerland still has to accept everybody. Should it change that requirement, Italy, France and Germany would block the borders, and let Switzerland die. Really, not kidding: Switzerland has only one refinery, producing 25% of Swiss fossil fuels, and it gets all its raw petroleum through a pipeline, from Marseilles, France… Thus, Switzerland will have to vote again. Or learn to ride horses again.

Why is such ferocity welcome in enforcing European unity and free circulation? Simple: Enforcing cogent, fully informed reason upon, and by, We The People, is the best way to avoid war. Thus war tends to happen when unexpected.

Europeans have bent over backwards frantically for twenty years to accommodate increasingly crazed, selfish, grotesque, hypernationalist British demands.  The British thanked the rest of Europe by an insulting vote. (Remark: the Swiss referendum was just about refusing the diktat of free circulation of any EU citizen; it was NOT about rejecting the 666 treaties with Europe… Although of course, it could have this consequence… Nor, a fortiori, the European Union )

Right now Europe is suffering from three mentalities:

1. The first problematic mentality was English sabotage. The English entered the “ever closer Union” and decided it was just a free trade “club”. Basically NAFTA. That was a lie, a breach of trust, and a betrayal. No wonder so many European leaders are keen to get Brexit done. For twenty years, English governments have prevented the built-up, in-depth of European laws and institutions. Instead of electing the head of the European Administration (“Commission”)  directly, by the People’s vote, one still uses the ancient system of nomination by the heads of governments. That sort of undemocratic blockage was the work of English Europhobes, mostly.

Fanatic Brexiters insist they never voted for a European “Superstate”. That is not just a total lie, but it means they want Europeans, and their ex-colonies and present allies, to be ruled by Superstates (USA, Russia, India, China).

2. The second problematic mentality is the fact that the European defense system is mostly operated by the French Republic, which is supposed to pay for it, while leaving its deficit below 3%. Logically, French tanks should first roll through Brussels, Luxembourg, Belgium, Lichtenstein, while addressing an ultimatum to Eurozone member Ireland, and force all these miscreants to pay taxes. (Since Germany has the same problem as its sister republic, France, it would rather applaud the usage of force… which is exactly what both of them did, with the help of Italy, to pressure Switzerland that way… It helped that the latter was not a founding member of the EU, and a rather small fish.)

What about the refugee crisis? Well, go back 17 centuries: the Goths, fleeing the Huns, invaded the Roman empire. Initially, the Goths came as refugees, and were allowed in. Later, even more Goths, now fully armed, came in, and thew Roman Empire said no. The solution? Have an army strong enough to kill the Huns. This was finally done in France, 80 years alter. First the inhabitants of Orleans inflicted a defeat on the Huns, inside the city itself. Then the Franks shadowed and harassed the retreating giant host of the Huns. That gave enough time for the Roman Field army headed by Aetius and to the Visigothic army to join the fray. Then the Huns got crushed in the titanic battle of the Catalaunian Plain. Having suffered tens of thousands of dead, if not hundreds of thousands (the number 300,000 has been advanced by sources), the spirit of the Huns was broken. Just as that of the Nazis in May 1945.

That was how to handle Assad: destroy him and his family, occupy Syria, re-establish secular, republican order. And it was not to the Russians or the Americans to do that, but to the Europeans. But there is no European army, no European will. Just European wealth for the world to steal. And for this, the ectoplasmic Britons are much to blame.: did they not learn anything from the Kaiser and his spiritual son Hitler?

As a result of formidable austerity imposed on France, the French defense system is woefully insufficient, although not quite as moribund as the British one. This is a grave situation in several ways: first it weakens the West enormously. Secondly it makes the USA more dominant than ever in defense. And thus, it augments the aura and diplomatic might of the USA in all matters, including the economic one… which pays for defense.

3. The third problematic mentality is indeed austerity itself. It was imposed by a coalition of conservatives and the evil influence of the ruling plutocracy. Great Britain saw less of it, thanks to the plutocratically owned tabloids, and the fact that plutocracy has made the wealthiest in Britain so much wealthier. Austerity is no less than a complete plutocratic plot, and a direct consequence of not taxing the wealthiest enough to spare us being in their debt.

So deep has the propaganda been for the plutocrats whom have made us in their debt, that only now the German SPD seems to realize that austerity is a plot of the wealthy. The “S” in SPD is for “Social”: Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD… The SPD is in coalition with the German Conservatives, who are white-hot, foaming at the mouth demanding ever more austerity (especially from other Europeans… It’s understandable as Germany is in a virtuous circle presently…)

Brexit can potentially break that logjam. First, British sabotage of the “Ever Closer Union” will stop. Appropriate superstate structures could now be erected, as needed… Secondly, the austerity party in the EU, right now led by Britain and Germany, is going to be halved. Thus one can hope that the French, these austerity specialists since 1932, will snap out of their madness, and lead a revolt against the austerity party. Simple: the European Union has just do what the USA has done under Obama. The Federal deficits amounts to something around 100% of US GDP (if one adds Quantitative Easing, an unusual addition, not usually made for obvious, vicious reasons, to the official deficits).

Will Europeans understand this?

Meanwhile, it’s fun to see the Brexiters struggle with the spider web above. Good luck coming out, to sink in the ocean…

Patrice Ayme’

 

The Way: ITER, CERN

There are only two fundamental, independent sources of energy: nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. All other energy “sources” are derivative of those two.

The distance between the world’s two most expensive science experiments, ITER and CERN, is less than 300 kilometers. Both powered by French nuclear energy. Discuss.

Fission nuclear energy powers the Earth (magnetic shield, plate tectonic, continental drift, subduction, volcanism).

Fusion nuclear energy powers the Sun (and thus the biosphere, past and future). (Thus those who hate “nuclear” should go see a shrink, and I’m here to help them before they hurt someone. )

Sol, A Yellow Dwarf Star: Hot, Not Cuddly

The center of the Sun is submitted to enormous pressure (340 million times atmospheric pressure), and a temperature of ten million degrees Kelvins. That‘s too hot, that is, too violent for atoms: shocks tear electrons from nuclei, and make an electron gas mixed with a gas of nuclei, that’s called a plasma.

Nuclei, each equipped with a positively charged proton, repel each other electrically.

[Sol is actually brighter than 85% of stars in the Milky Way; it’s actually white; the atmosphere scatters the blue component of light, making it look yellow from Earth’s surface!]

600 million tons of the Sun’s hydrogen fuse, converting 5 million tons to energy, each second.

The enormous pressure and heat mean that hydrogen nuclei are packed up close together, and are extremely agitated, with gigantic kinetic energy. So, sometimes, two protons crash into each other head on, and the violence of the collision overwhelms the electric repulsion.

At very short range the nuclear force is attractive. It overwhelms all other forces, and the two protons stick together. This happens more readily if two electrically neutral neutrons join in, as they contribute their attractiveness, and none of the electric repulsion.

British physicists Aston and Eddington suggested in the 1920s that the sun got its power from fusing Hydrogen into Helium. Indeed adding the mass of two heavy hydrogen nuclei (each with one proton and one neutron) is more than that of the Helium nucleus they fuse into. The difference is released as energy, according to the famous Poincare’(-Einstein) E = mcc formula.

“Synthesis of the Elements in Stars“, published in 1957 by the extremely famous astrophysicists Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle, demonstrated convincingly that most elements in the universe had been synthesized by nuclear reactions inside stars. Heavy elements, such as iron, had been produced by the dramatic explosions of supernova.

As I have argued in H Fusion Or Bust, we desperately need nuclear energy, as our main energy system, burning fossils, is both running out and poisoning the entire biosphere, killing already an unbelievably unnoticed  several million people a year (soon to be dozens of millions a year, dead). Unfortunately, millions of retards are goose stepping behind well organized, and well paid fossil fuel propagandists, and doing nothing about it, while they howl about nuclear energy.

One angle of attack for reducing pollution is to build Thorium-U233 fission plants. Such reactors have lots of advantage, including the fact be made before and have unproblematic waste. (What’s less easy is to scale them up economically, because it was not done before; India and China have massive programs.)

Thermonuclear fusion has been mastered in bombs, using the dirty trick of using the fantastic temperature and pressure of an exploding Plutonium fission “pit”. That would allow to explode bombs as powerful as 100 Megaton of TNT, or more, enough to bust or deviate a large comet or asteroid.

Some adore the facile joke of saying thermonuclear fusion has been the energy of the future, and always will be. It’s idiotic: it took 7 centuries between the invention of gun powder in China and the first (hydrogen!) internal combustion engine, a succession of explosions (early 19C, Switzerland).

There are two main approaches for inducing fusion: shock, and heat (like in an H bomb), using lasers. This approach is pursued in the Bay Area and Bordeaux. It tends to be military financed, as it simulates H bombs, and lasers are irresistible to real men.

The other approach is the Tokamak (abbreviation of Russian for TOroidal Chamber MAKgnetic). France, as usual in the last three millennia, is at the forefront of the effort to create new technology.  The French already built no less than four tokamaks, and their Tore Supra has enlightened us all with phenomena never seen before. It found OVNIs (Objet Volants Non Identifies)

OVNI Inside Thermonuclear Plasma.

[Tore Supra, Cadarache.]

France has few natural resources, but the will to produce a lot of ideas. She is adamant to make nuclear fusion work. As the New Yorker puts it:

“if all goes according to plan, the most complex machine ever built will be switched on in an Alpine forest in the South of France. The machine, called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. At its core, densely packed high-precision equipment will encase a cavernous vacuum chamber, in which a super-hot cloud of heavy hydrogen will rotate faster than the speed of sound, twisting like a strand of DNA as it circulates. The cloud will be scorched by electric current (a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity), and bombarded by concentrated waves of radiation. Beams of uncharged particles—the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds—will pour into the chamber, adding tremendous heat. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized, and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius—more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core.”

ITER will the hottest phenomenon in the Solar System, ever.

Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear. The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement, will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element—helium—and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released: intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons propelled in every direction. There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing. Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond—all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world. Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero, nearly the temperature of deep space. Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness of ITER’s vacuum interior.

No one knows ITER’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes ITER the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. But if it is truly possible to bottle up a star, and to do so economically, the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years, and help save the planet from environmental catastrophe. Hydrogen, a primordial element, is the most abundant atom in the universe, a potential fuel that poses little risk of scarcity. Eventually, physicists hope, commercial reactors modelled on ITER will be built, too—generating terawatts of power with no carbon, virtually no pollution, and scant radioactive waste. The reactor would run on no more than seawater and lithium. It would never melt down. It would realize a yearning, as old as the story of Prometheus, to bring the light of the heavens to Earth, and bend it to humanity’s will. ITER, in Latin, means “the way.”.

The main road to the ITER construction site from Aix-en-Provence, where I had booked a room, is the A51 highway. The drive is about half an hour, winding north past farmland and the sun-glittered Durance River. Just about every form of energy is in evidence nearby, from hydroelectric dams to floating solar panels. Seams of lignite, a soft brownish coal, run beneath the soil in Provence, but the deposits have become too expensive to mine. Several miles from Aix, a large coal plant, with a chimney that climbs hundreds of feet into the sky, is being converted to burn biomass—leaves, branches, and agricultural debris.

Actually the chimney is 300 meters tall, and not just a symbol of pollution, but a real health problem when there is no mistral and a temperature inversion. When there is mistral, the pollution can head towards Rome. ITER is up the Durance valley. At its source, my daughter was born. Up the nearby Rhone valley, nuclear power reactor parks have the added touch of giant windmills on site while atomic powered Very High Speed trains zoom by (in case, somehow, power goes down, the mistral is supposed to help, as it already did, 1,000 years ago).

In 1997 the JET (Joint European Torus) based in England, produced about as much power through fusion as what put in. So controlled thermonuclear fusion is not a dream. The reactor instantaneously overheated, within a second, and had to be shut down.

Meanwhile in Cadarache, the French tokamak Tore Supra succeeded to confine thermonuclear plasma for more than 6 minutes (by opposition to just one second in JET). Tore Supra could do this as the world’s only tokamak with supraconducting magnets to generate long term magnetic fields. Tore Supra’s walls were built of pure carbon, same as the nose of the space shuttle. It looked like a good guess: carbon has the highest solid temperature (it sublimates directly).

Plasmas are occasionally unstable: look at the picture of the Sun above, complete with explosions, and prominences hundreds of thousands of kilometers long. In a reactor, everything can be perfect for long minutes, and then suddenly all goes to hell without a hand-basket, and the plasma comes in contact with the walls, photo-abrading, tearing carbons away, and prying some of the strongest materials on Earth with forces of hundreds of tons, as if they were made of cardboard:

French Reactor Torn By Thermonuclear Plasma

[Inside Tore Supra, Cadarache, next to ITER.]

The forces that can be unleashed in a thermonuclear reactor are of the order of the largest rockets ever launched (and even several times that in ITER).  The French nuclear safety authority forced the ITER organization to make the reactor’s floor twice stronger than it wanted it to be (the Princeton tokamak jumped in the air).

Not touching the walls is part of the Plasma Facing Material problem (PFM). The plasma, once loaded with tritium, then would have combined to create radioactive carbures. So the French scientists discovered that carbon, in appearance the best candidate for PFM had to be given up.

JET has been rebuilt as a forerunner of ITER, it is now relined with Beryllium . The results have been excellent, and ITER will go directly to such a lining. (Baby ITER, JET will be reloaded with radioactive, easy to fuse, Tritium within two years.)

French Physics Nobel, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes said of controlled nuclear fusion, “We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don’t know how to make the box.”

The problem is obvious: the highest temperature a solid can sustain is less than 5000 Kelvins at room temperature. The plasma is 40,000 times hotter.

The box has to be electromagnetic. And it has to be perfect, and require mathematics beyond what we can master (mathematics break through allowed the long term containment in Tore Supra). Can it be done? It better be. There is no other option.

Except war. But Putin, the world’s most powerful dictator, already thought of that one.

Putin, of course, is a self-satisfied, vicious idiot with a short alpha man inferiority complex. This shows that the present dominant political system, electing “leaders” every now and then, is, itself, idiotic. The invasion of Ukraine could lead, indeed, to a world war, under some scenarios. Scenarios under which the “West” would act perfectly, let it be said in passing (in 1939, France and Britain, by declaring war to Hitler, acted perfectly… later the war went badly, but that’s another subject).

Idiocy is not just deplorable, it’s a moral problem. In the USA, one meets people raging against France all the time. That makes them morally inferior, and such people were gung ho for invading Iraq.

Basically, anything the USA can do, France can do. No exception. France is the only state capable of this, in the world (even Great Britain buy part of its strategic nuclear deterrent in the USA; France makes its own, and its arguably as limber as the USA’s).

This goes a long way to explain anti-French racism in the USA: here is a Socialist country that does just as well, does not that prove being a slave to Wall Street is pointless? France socialist? Not only the Parti Socialiste holds most elected offices, state spending in France is 57% of GDP (the highest in Europe with Denmark, but Denmark can’t make war around the world).

What the millions of little American minds who rage against France are truly raging again is anything that could hurt their master, plutocracy.

Another example of raging idiocy is directed at CERN. OK, CERN is an abbreviation from the French, and the Large Hadron Collider is mostly below France and fed by French nuclear power, so it’s related to the preceding.

Critics of CERN claim it could swallow the Earth, thus demonstrating their lack of education. Ironically, they probably read that on the Internet. And CERN invented the World Wide Web.

CERN Inventing World Wide Web, 1989.

Would CERN haters become less hateful if they read on the Internet that CERN invented the WWW? Not sure. Idiocy is fungible. If it’s not this, it will be the other thing.

There is no solution to the mayhem caused by burning fossil fuels, except nuclear energy. No solution, except war. But Putin, the dictator of the world’s largest petrostate is already a pawn for that system of thought.

Patrice Aymé

TomDispatch Dispatched

There is a great number of maniacs planted all over the Internet, spewing insanities so outrageous that the distraction they provide, serve, in the end, the plutocratic masters they live off like leeches. One cannot have democracy, when too much credulity and imbecillity thrive all over. It’s high time to call idiocy by its name. One should not be able to make a business from idiocy, and not be denounced. Thanks to my friend Paul Handover, I detected a “Tomgram”, called “A New World Order” full of idiotic gems such as:

“As for more traditional imperial-style wars, you can count them on one hand, possibly one finger: the 2013 French intervention in Mali (after a disastrous U.S./NATO air-powered intervention in Libya destabilized that neighboring country).  France has also sent its troops elsewhere in Africa, most recently into the Central African Republic, but these were at best micro-versions of nineteenth century colonial wars.”

Seeing The Devil When It’s Just Smoke Is A Problem

[WTC On Fire, 9/11.]

The intervention in Libya was started with the French Air Force’s annihilation of Qaddafi’s armor on a Saturday during a peace conference about Libya in Paris. The French president informed the startled attendees, including the foreign minister of the USA, Hillary Clinton,  that the war had started. The French used to best effect their supersonic active stealth bombers, the Rafales to destroy the modern Libyan air defenses (some of them secretly, and unlawfully provided by Russia).

The French thus put to an end a bloody 40 year old dictatorship that, by some measures, was even more vicious than Hitler’s (Qaddafi was personally doing atrocious things to even very young girls; some survived and give interviews).

The French attack was motivated by saving the intelligentsia and other rebels in Bengahzi. Some of Qaddafi’s tanks made it to Benghazi, just before the start of the French action.

Months later, after the war had stalled, Tripoli fell from an air bridge organized completely by the French to bring heavy weapons, as they allied themselves with the remnants of the original pre-Punic civilization of ancient Libya, with their 3,000 years old alphabet. French marines (“Marsoins”) discreetly intervened on the ground, to seize Tripoli in a lightning strike of a few hours.

The war finished when French bombing flushed Qaddafi out of his last redoubt in his birthplace. More French bombing annihilated the 200 vehicle convoy Qaddafi was fleeing in (although one tiny USA drone chimed in).

So when Tomdispatch talks about “USA/NATO air-powered intervention in Libya“, he is counterfactual: it was mostly led and carried over by France (which flew the most combat missions, by far, with giant bombs, and SCALP missiles).

(BTW, it’s exactly what I suggested to do before it happened; France, and Britain, should re-establish discipline and re-introduce civilization, in Africa, as needed by emergencies… And the Russia-Qaddafi invasion of Africa was certainly such an emergency: they even used supersonic boimbers in Chad… Until the French shot some down, and nealy killed Qaddafi during his invasion of Chad.)

Talking about “destabilization of that neighboring country” is about as intelligent as talking about “destabilization of Germany” in 1945. Yes, so Tomdispatch, what’s your problem? Loving Qaddafi because he tortured people to death? What else do you love? The Gestapo? The NKVD, the KGB, the FSB? Loving big, bad Nazis? Mourning them?

Libya is a complex situation, because, it’s not just full of tribes, but full of civilizations, some of them oppressed for 20, 16, or 13 centuries…

That the Nafusa mountain 3,000 years old civilization, or the Cyrenaica 2,000 year old nationhood want a degree of autonomy is fine with me. Cyrenaica wants to tax 15% the oil coming from its territory, as if it were California inside the USA. Tripoli does not agree, so there is a stand-off, and oil production from Libya have come down 5/6. Thus Americans like TomDispatch cry and proclaim that a disaster. For materialists such as TomDispatch, apparently the measure of all things is oil. No oil coming out of Libya? How, that has got to be a disaster.

A Constituent Assembly was just constituted, through elections. The USA took 13 years from independence (1776) from the hated king to a Constitution (1789).

The Libyan French attack, the Mali, and the CAR French attacks were authorized by the United Nations’ Security Council. To call the humanitarian intervention of France in the Central African Republic is vicious and idiotic. Once again, it’s the point of view of people who may not be Nazis, but define as good the worst the Nazis did, namely massacring civilians, and mayhem for mayhem’s sake.

Weirdly, TomDispatch concludes with:

“Still, for the moment no rising empire and no states fighting each other.  So who knows?  Maybe we are off the beaten path of history and in terra incognita.  Perhaps this is a road we’ve never been down before, an actual new world order.”

This was written 5 days after Putin invaded Ukraine: how idiotic can one be, not to notice that, and realize there is a major problem? Not content with invasion, and sinking an enormous ship to block a major port, Putin claimed that the Constitutional government in Ukraine (elected in Parliamentary elections in 2010, having voted a new government with a 83% majority) was a “coup” by “Neo-Nazis” and “fascist”, and that, therefore, he would violate all treaties signed previously, including the one about the security of Ukraine, which was signed in exchange of Ukraine relinquishing its nuclear weapons.

That’s a grievous lies equivalent to a declaration of war. Thus Putin’s assault certainly qualifies as a fight between two states, and that fight started in November, when the preceding Ukraine president admitted he got an ultimatum from Putin to cease and desist signing an association accord with the European Union.

Moreover Putin is undergoing, as we watch, the same neurohormonal changes that visited the Kaiser, Molkte, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and other crazed maniacs thrughout history (think about Pol Pot and his accomplices in Cambodia, Bonaparte turning into Napoleon, or Louis XIV metamorphing from a friend of modern thinking, to the guy who honded Protestants out of France).

All over the media, many speak with authority, but all they tell is lies. TomDispatch is not the worst offender. Others have written together a bunch of hallucinations by mental retards widely advertized as serious studies such “World War One Was About Oil, And So Is Ukraine”. Or that Obama killed 200,000 people in Syria, and other insanities, from friends of fascism posing as mutually described “progressives“, such as the one who wrote“Putin Group Hate“. The worst? Many believe them. There is no doubt some of these people are paid, as their own sedition from reality has been turned into a business selling unreal dreams.

What do these maniacs have all in common? They never talk about what would really hinder the plutocrats, namely a Financial Transaction Tax, high margin tax rates, tax havens, corporations avoiding taxes through shell companies, Quantitative Easing and fractional reserve system. It’s not too difficult to imagine who planted thosediscourses that pose as extremely critical, but are just completely irrelevant to any sort of reality.

Plants talking? One more miracle of the Internet age, beyond the miracle of the currency that has no state, just a scheming pyramid, or the corporations that are the wealthiest in the world, while paying no tax, except as a data flow to the NSA.

Patrice Aymé