*no John, that’s ‘Kept very small by growing it in a little pot & cutting it in a special way’ – go animรฉ ๐ ?
โHello Nature readers, Today we read words hidden in Roman scrolls burnt by the ancient eruption of Mount Vesuvius, explore the largest-ever atlas of the human brain and learn how we might melt lunar dust into paving slabs.Simulated Moon dust is melted into slabs of different shapes that could be fitted together to make a paved surface. (PAVER Consortium)
โA beam of concentrated sunlight could melt lunar dust into paving slabs for use in building roads on the Moon. In a laboratory experiment, scientists melted a substance resembling Moon dust with a laser that gives out the same amount of power as an imagined โsunlight concentratorโ. Roads could provide areas for spacecraft to land or move around without churning up fine Moon dust, which can damage instruments.Nature | 3 min read Reference: Scientific Reports paper
โMore than 3,000 cell types โ many of them new to science โ have been revealed in the largest-ever atlas of human neurons and other brain cells. One team that contributed to the huge project, which involved hundreds of scientists, sequenced the RNA of more than three million cells. Another uncovered links between certain types of brain cell and neuropsychiatric disorders. โThis is only the beginning,โ says molecular biologist Bing Ren.Nature | 5 min read Reference: 21 papers in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine
โA 21-year-old undergraduate student has cracked a method for reading charred, unopenable scrolls from the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. Luke Farritor trained a machine-learning algorithm on fragments of unrolled scrolls, detecting spots where the ink causes a tiny difference in texture. He then analysed closed scrolls that had been penetrated using X-ray computed tomography scans. The breakthrough could unlock the contents of hundreds of never-before-seen writings that were buried by Mount Vesuvius in October AD 79. Nature | 7 min read The first word deciphered is the Greek ฯฮฟฯฯฯฯฮฑฯ, meaning โpurpleโ (either the adjective or used as a noun, as in purple cloth or dye). (Vesuvius Challenge)
โGenerative artificial intelligence (AI) can radically shorten the time it takes for a potential new drug to reach clinical trials โ or so pharmaceutical companies say. โThe findings need to be published in the peer-reviewed literature and authenticated by researchers unaffiliated with the companies involved,โ argues a Nature editorial. In particular, this means finding a way to share the results pharmaceutical companies tend to keep secret.Nature | 5 min read
โAndrew Robinsonโs pick of the top five science books to read this weekincludes an exploration of imaginationโs role in science, a โmosaic biographyโ of Albert Einstein and an important, if depressing, analysis of the worldโs return to economic nationalism.Nature | 3 min read
โKidneys from genetically engineered miniature pigs have been transplanted into monkeys, in one case keeping an animal alive for more than two years. The gene edits helped to prevent the monkeysโ immune systems from attacking the organs, although the animals still had to be treated with immunosuppressive drugs. One day, such xenotransplants could overcome the severe shortage of human organs available for transplantation. โA lot of the researchers I talked to are itching to start human trials,โ reporter Max Kozlov tells the Nature Podcast.Nature Podcast | 21 min listen Subscribe to the Nature Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify, or use the RSS feed.
โFruitful robotโhuman partnerships โ like those between NASA scientists and the Mars rovers โ reveal a future in which artificial intelligence extends and complements human qualities, rather than replacing people, argues sociologist Janet Vertesi. (The Conversation | 5 min read)
Neurolinguistics, Human Health & Philosophy of Science Australia
Sat 14th October 2023
* I can almost guarantee you will not be able to pull up our source document to any of your screens for reproduction (or replication in the strictly methodical-science sense) which is of course why I have screeenshot & transcribed it in full.. I can also sadly predict that this information reloading will be a function soon denied us by the global neofascist totalitarianism-headed microelectronics synthetic intelligence Cabal and its head-banging MAGA muskovites, Stephen Bannons, Mark Zuckerbergs, Geoff Bezoses & Sundar Pichais and sky๐๐๐s๐ญ & armaments psychopaths๐บ๐ฆ๐ฆ๐ฒ๐ฑ๐พ๐ธ๐พ๐ต๐ธ
Readers will forgive that this essay is jarringly incomplete and a bit of a dissequenced if not discordant jumble1 but I’ll get back to work on it soon.
These are extaordinarily demanding and busy times for professional economics, decarbonisation and social policy writers.
John
The second part of this essay quotes RV Sampson. I gather he was a psychiatrist. These people last century produced some startling cultural historical observations. Who, with a penchant for acid sociology could forget the acerbic Ronald Conway from Melbourne, for one example? He thought we Australians were all rabbits, or bogans were. Had a point, there.. Had the book never read it. There’s been a thousand titles likje that in my life. They get nicked because some fool thinks you may have the Vatican secrets of numerology (I haven’t.. well hang on) and the situation with your doomed book is analogous with the purloined brain of Abert Einstein – some dude, possibly Elon Musk’s grandfather or the Unabomber – put it in his boot (trunk in USA) and drove around the backroads of California before suffering a psycho-affective episode.
I made that last bit up. The second and concluding part of the essay conveys the message of the Holy Father of the Church of Rome (last warning to the world on the now plainly apocalyptic ramifications of man-made global heating)… Science is vital to solving the challenges we face, from pandemics to climate change. Tonight weโre celebrating the heroes of Australian science. Congratulations to Professor Michelle Simmons AO, winner of the 2023 Prime Ministerโs Prize for Science, and all award recipients, some historical blip said.
The third part is three paragraphs anchoring the scientific responsibilty question in the socio-cultural bedrock concerning who the hell we Australians think we are at this pre-apocalyptic historical moment and just when do we fancy we can get down to work for our country and the kids, presently swamped from toddlerhood by the mental health and eating-disorders bomb of performative display suffused with coercion, violation, assault and sex-role stereoptyping. Some of us publicly stated 32 years that the @Nickelodeon thing was destructive. That was a simple case, but the cutesifying and putting on show of litlle kids is in this old social workers’ view reminiscent of the Judy Garland syndrome ‘child star’ mothers’ of last century isexactly in psycho-emotional synchrony with the unstoppable slough of phoney affective empathy for the ageing-and-slowing – the gauche method-acting stuff, high-brow English Anthony Hopkins included. It’s all Dame Edna deceased, Macca the Quacker on Sunday, Margaret Court, Ita Buttrose and Bronwyn Bishop kerosene baths to me. This area of social policy, where Australia is largely turgid, gross and stupored, is another where we’ve SO much to do! I was secretary to the SA Government Enquiry into Nursing Homes & Hostels in the year my dad died, 1986.
The Sampson – he was writing in the early 1960s
If philosophers nowadays must be philosophers’ philosophers, if the whole enterprise is an esoteric affair reflecting the peculiar interests of a tiny group, why should the rest of us care one way or the other? Let them get on with it. It is no concern of ours. A popular attitude of sceptical indifference may reinforce the professional pride of a few, themselves indifferent to popular opinion. This is a mistaken attitude. The role of the philosopher in society is always important. H[-is/ -er] influence, though intangible, permeates society and helps to shape the ideas of people entirely innocent of the original issues. The revolution in modern philosophy has had at least two important consequences.
It has almost certainly had a subtle effect on the respective influence of intellectuals an men [and women] of affairs. A theory of knowledge, validating moral judgments only in the limited sense of attributing to them intelligibility and coherence relative to their culture, is essentially pragmatic. Tests of value are pragmatic judgments governed by the facts. The facts are determined by the existing order of society:> the judgments by the theoretical framework underpinning the existing social order. To question that framework involves an alternative metaphysic. But since this debate has been discredited as logically bogus, the terms of political debate are restricted to the assumptions of the existing order. These have ‘reality’ status and constitute the essence of the pragmatic appeal. Me [and women] of action generally, when confronted by theories repugnant to them, are very ready in the absence of alternative argument to dismiss theory that is critical of their assumptions as mere theory as contrasted with something they call experience. In this sense, businessmen together with their military, political and ecclesiastical ancillaries create a conservative climate of opinion in which the theorising of the intellectual is at a discount. The world of getting and spending is inevitably fashioned in the image of those who get and spend. It can only be effectively criticised in the light of theory deriving from something other than the ad hoc experience of the commercial world. Intellectual theorising is liable to be regarded with distrust as something alien, threatening established power or acquisitive instincts. Theory as such may be condemned in advance as unpractical or the practice of an armchair critic..
“Copernicus did not dare publish his heliocentric theory until the year of his death; Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake; Galileo was compelled to retract the Copernican hypothesis. If our time [written 58 years ago,by RV Sampson] has seen the growth of a more tolerant climate, the scurrilous vituperation that greeted the discoveries of Darwin and Freud belong only to yesterday. When the object of investigation is the human being himself, resistance may be expected to be even more virulent than in the case of the physical world. “It is easy,” wrote Tolstoy in Kreutzer Sonata, to learn whether there is much iron in the sun, and what other metals there are in the sun and the stars; but it is hard, yes, frightfully hard, to discover that which convicts us of immorality.” But even more elemental and pervasive than the emotional resistance to truth deriving from the need to feel moral is the need not to appear different. The psychic pressure towards uniformity – what used to be referred to as the ‘herd instinct’ – stems from the basic emotions of insecuritygrinch. Contemporary sociological investigations have provided very strong empirical confirmation of the thesis so vividly embodied in Hans Christian Andersen in his story, The Emporer’s Clothes. Frighteningly large numbers of people will apparently deny even the elementary evidence of their senses rather than risk appearing to take a lone or unpopular stand. Even in the scientific world, persistence in advocacy of a hypothesis rejected by a majority of professional colleagues requires courage. But the difficulty goes deeper than that. The pressure exercised by a uniform, received opinion may be so overwhelming that no individual may be capable of emancipating himself sufficiently from a common delusion to bring his critical faculties to bear. The idea with which to challenge existing assumptions is prevented by unconscious resistance or defect of imagination from even arising in the mind..”
Culture What Culture1
Our Aristotelian mission (to find out the existing means of persuasion, where a well-founded, methodically presented, logically coherent or soundly-argued proposition is presented in terms of the scientific norms and conventions of the day) may be thwarted by erroneous belief, by want of imagination or by lack of enthusiasm for the innovative proposition presented, perhaps not in fact even recognising it to be of legitimate academic, professional or personal concern and quite possibly, if these attitudes are on display, moral or mental laziness, defensiveness or even ‘pre-retirement’ fatigue and ennui.
It must be noted that in upper income or ‘managerial class’ Australia and the USA there is a norm to the effect that individuals in positions of authority & responsibility who are clearly neuro-cognitively slowing-down and must try to deal quickly, fairly and judiciously with personnel & technical issues arising amongst staff and suppliers, including many of those unheard of in their earlier lives as for example par excellence in frankly puzzled if not light-headed technophile Australia, affecting people of all ages, of course, especially the vulnerable deskilled young, the questions What are #ChatGPT, @AIOnlineStore or #LLMs are greeted with cheerful replies to the effect that they help people write stuff: creative arts who needs ’em in this zany post-fact, post truth wherever they can swing it – advertising and promotions dollars, government grants sure – big aeroplane rides world of theirs – should be allowed, no encouraged, to work until they drop off their perches.
My mother was Lois Blundell a nursing home owner whose brother said the above of her in response to my plea to him to help me persuade “the Matron” to retire before she killed herself or one of the residents of Warwick Nursing Home, Unley SA – “No, she’ll go until she drops off her perch,” he said, with an obvious snarl. The woman when she was around 75, an employer with a 2 1/2 inches thick abuse-of-staff compaints file (her first-born, me, a state union branch secretary and president 1980 to 1985) at the Nurses Board and was a well known SA Employers Federation later Business SA “dragon” was ‘spotted coming’ by both the ALP and the LPA in Adelaide who sought to punish me for embarrassing them electorally in May 1992, so the Dean Brown government abolished the Nurses Board and this utter moral grub with my younger brother contrived to defraud me of $500,000 of property – the lot, my vertically integrated businesses in the organics industry, my home, marriage and ex-family relationships. My total assets to this day are some $2,000. But i am, luckily, a total kick-arse politician of the as yet unelected variety and an internationally known scholar, so that’s fine. You would all have noticed there is so much intelligent and decisive work to do. Australia’s become, in the 27 years since the suburban Methodist lawyer, a Westfield full of imported junk thats being replaced by online shopping & bank account fraud on behalf of old folks’ investment and pension funds in North America or some shit. We’ve still got a fat and shiny Lend Lease Corporation. It’s a joke, Joyce. Eight million of us are in housing poverty and the environment is a unwatchable television panel show debating point, so it’s kind-of cool that the #Climate #Wars are, er, over. Ooooowhhheee, kids.
John Blundell
Neurolinguistics, Economy, Sociology, Energy Studies, Weather Systems & Philosophy of Science
Australia 19/10/2023
1 ..alarmingly congruent with national affairs in Australia this morning Thursday 19th October 2023 as exemplified by the following two conversational linguistic atrocities – definitional malicious genocidal @Facebook mis-information – Clare O’Neil, Australian minister of Home Affairs does not dismiss emphatically the suggestion that Ed Husic, Minister of Science.. wants the colours of the Palestinian flag displayed on the roof of the Sydney Opera House + a tergiversatorial – look it up – I just did – it’s a scream – ideological NO-REGULATION neoliberal polemicist on the country’s premier conversational radio ‘octopus,’ Radio Diddly Squat I as a sociologist called it 26 years ago, my life & business smashed by gangsters and cops, says “if we stopped using paper and eating meat today,” [would that help?]
2 Culture, what is that? Literacy, articulacy, professional-standard journalism not reading mind-numbing Switch-me-off bags of cliches and political slogans approved by @Harvard – Princeton – Standord – Yale – UCLA – MIT – Boundary Bend Indiana for Christ’s Sake – @GoldmanSachs.. Schwab, Soros, the Koch Brother (?), Sarah Palin, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, @RepMTG, Donald Take-a-dump, Stepen Bannon, Mark Zuckerberg and to cap all that in the Skip domain the ludicrous so-called BIG 4 who actually take care of the business of government @KPMG @PwC Ernst & Young and the estimable if doughty @Deloitte, more communications-crunchy (by a fine margin of one @X account) > than Bloomberg
What began innocently enough with vapid vanity podcasts produced by bored affluent under 30s with careers as โinfluencersโ in newsmedia, music or movies in mind has now imploded, splurged & spattered into all of our lives with a ludicrous and frankly UNLISTENABLE flood & orgy (beat that) of psychobabbling excerpts from Twentieth Century song, film & news bulletins: artificial disintelligence.
Although I am a professional 12/7/52 journalist – yes kiddies independent and unpaid and (gulp) not formally qualified – one of the hallmarks genuine historians of human culture repeatedly have noted, down the ages, is bullying coercive authoritarianism – so thanks, you idiots, Sergeant Plods, David Andersons and whoever might be โrunningโ SBS, you may go now – I have not for three months listened to more than a minute at a time of radio or television news or news commentary produced in Australia. This puts a new light on junk time.1
We are a society so taken with getting and spending that we appear to have forgotten to analyse ourselves or reflect on.. well, anything. To be brash discursive dismissive and.. well, mouth off at, other countries, other people, other ethnicities, other philosophical persuasions and, why the hell not, other skin-tones andthe other primary gender as well are us.
I was listening to a cloying turgid kiddie chat from Boston last night purportedly about AI..Oh the poor old benighted You You You Essay – NO, Little Machine, not be-knighted..
Kadina-born election strategist Lynton Crosby knighted in the UK
In a world that now thanks to more than 50 years of Chicago School, MIT and @Harvard Programmed Learning โmind-fuckโ – technically Social Darwinism, historically dating especially from the 1930s USA child-cruelty โPsychologyโ and European #Fascist eugenics – is largely wracked, traumatised (terrorised, indeed) and more than half broken ecologically – we none of us may be content with a cultural diet of deracinated nonsense from turgid cloying dead-from-the-neck-up 20th century speeches, songs and movies that were mostly chewing gum for the eyes ears nose & throat in the first place. History mauls and trashes those who fool with it and totalitarian – or -aryan – patriarchy is not it, OK?
If you’d like a full-on dominant (if not hegemonic2) cultural explosion of human passion to witness – โlocal & liveโ as the Old Era publicists would routinely spout – try the extraordinary explosion of football skills among young Australian sheilas in the last four short years.. And here we go, students, it is, yes, a furiously angry and powerful statement against mentally bereft old โbusinessโ men. Wheel out the @Yale rowing, er cricket, er Rugger theme-song ladies. Sociologists love this shit. Itโs amazing.
Oh my dear Supply-siders , as I woke this morning I reflected I had not actually heard a single discussion on AI in Australia – or in USA newsmedia including the progressive Left/ Young @WBUR that was not also time-filler, wide-eyed, open-mouthed kids with their Christmas stockings consumer detritus.
โShould old people get a vote in the referendum? ..they wonโt be around to see the consequences.โ
David Bowman Australian Broadcasting Corporation Adelaide South Australia
โWeโre dealing with the fragments of an idea here..โ – a typically polite, non-confrontative, โgentlemanlyโ South Australian in the post-fact domain of contemporary tendentious undergraduate Spite & Gotcha neo absurdist Australian public affairs.
Mother of Fork. How can we go on in this literally demented vein Australia? An unexamined life is alas and indeedvery soon a dead body.
Waleed โn Scott, Radio National People
Well thatโs me done for now. โLoveโ the smell of ideologic fascist putrefaction in the morning.
My non sarcastic & real love this morning is for the 16,000 immigration-scam people subject by degrees to virtual imprisonment, 24/ 7 coercion, forced labour and psycho- emotional torture. Weโre told only 600 a year come forward for help. New South Wales police like it like that and after all is said and done โmanagingโ blackfellas and non-โwhiteโ offshore-borns is their bag.
The โgoodโ old NSW Labor Right and the Anglican Archdiocese of Sydney, we reflect.
WHEN will we get the movie for Christโs sake?
John Blundell
Philosophy of Science Australia
..proudly Economics History Sociology Human Health and the new Neurolinguistics
1Consumer Alert: next comes the bit where you find to your dismay that you have indeed wasted your powers.
2 Gramsci – can’t pull up the pic so here’s his Right-side Supply-side alter-ego idiot
Electric ๐ & ๏ฟผ๐ Dude, USAHere he was – in this heroic @iOS vs @Microsoft tussle both sides have their uses
Charlemagne a member of the Carolingian dynasty, King of the Franks 768, King of the Lombards 774, crowned as Emporer of the Romans by the Pope Leo III in 800
I see a Gates msm.com banner this Thursday afternoon 31/8 aver the wheels are falling off the Anthony Albanese government.. oh, we gird our mental loins not only to possibly combat urinary incontinence but to deal emotionally with a days-long barrage of Samuel Longhorn Clemens ‘reports-of-my-death’ quips dredged from #ChatGPT, #CaLM or other #LLMs ad nauseam, indeed ad the death (mortem) from grown men and women on $150,000 a year salaries (with lots of rides on big aeroplanes) possessed of ferocious contempt for Julian Assange, Richard Boyle, David McBride and lately Daniel Duggan – and I must add men with no savings, assets or homes to call their own who’ve given worldwide leadership over 40 years in regenerative organic food production, value-adding and marketing and are now, as they enter their mid-seventies actually engaged and globally respected driving cohesive global philosophy of science awareness and intelligent adaptive decision in economy, ecology, sociology and human cultures – this being literally the dead-end of so-called Enlightenment or Romance Era 1500 – 2023 neoclassical “scholarship,” literature, science and barmy or completely bonkers Manichean metaphysics – but sadly fell foul of South Australian politicians and the variously mentally-raddled and full-blown sociopathic keepers of the morally and mentally unholy grail of Australian, British and North American show-business vanity-project racist sexist fascist murderous newsmedia..
NOW many of you good readers will be snarly, scared, forlorn, confused, exuberant or curled up in a ball behind the kitchen door next to the rerigerator at this and it may help to have a look at your Romance Era belief-systems, la..
โBoccaliniโs account of the significance of power for the politician is today paralleled by the role of the doctrine of raison dโรฉtat in the minds of contemporary students of international diplomacy at strategy. The belief in the inevitability of raison dโรฉtat with its reliance on violence and the threat of violence as the controlling force in human affairs is uncritically accepted. State power relations expressed in a dynamic equilibrium of terror have come to assume an independent life of their own.
โThe logic of the.. war against all, and itโs source in human greed and fear, has never been more succinctly expressed than in Treitschkeโs enunciation of the two essential tenets of Machiavellism.
โThey merit quotation in full, since they will be seen to go to the root of the matter.
โ 1. Your neighbour, even though [es sei denn] he may look upon you as his natural ally against another power which is feared by you both, is always ready at the first opportunity as soon as it can be done with safety, to better himself at your expense. He is forced to do it, if he is wise; and could not hold back, even if he were your brother.
โ 2. It is altogether insufficient for you to defend your own territory; on the contrary, you must keep your gaze fixed dispassionately on everything which could influence your situation, and you must in no way tolerate that anything inside these boundaries of your influence should be altered to your detriment, and never hesitate a moment if you can order something there to your advantage. For you can rest assured that the other will do the same whenever he can and if you delay in doing it now on your side then you will get behind him. Whoever fails to increase his power must decrease it, if others increase theirs.” 1,1A
Now there’s closely cognate or connected thoughts of only the last few years from Richard Stivers, for one2, also to the effect that all your affective empathy, modest public displays of compassion, sympatica, fellow-feeling, high-minded neoclassical (say 1840 -1910 City of London) altruism, tolerance (what is that?), self-sacrifice, dedicated attendance at literally hundreds of figuratively head-banging waste-your-little-life-away meetings where miners, people whose Registered Offices were remote beach shacks and “developers” waltzed in and fleeced your country of $100s of millions and then raced off to the Deputy Commissioner for Taxation (Australia) for more, your special minority interest-group campaigns and displays, indeed all ‘your’ piety, wit or even tears – as the pote3 wrote – could not lure it back to cancel half a line or wash out a word of it.. but the Niccolo Machiavelli is plenty to ponder at this moment I think.
See my @X for a Stivers book and a 2022 article.
On another matter, but think how intimately and even inextricably related – thinking, positing or propounding on absolutely any matter without sincerity and adult follow-up action is what narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, crooks and phonies do. So listen to the kids not the respected elders: you’re not writing a Face/ Insta vanity-piece or tourism promo, docu-drama or some biography for nostalgic old folk. Today belongs to you. With the National Socialists it was only Tomorrow4 – that way the eager boys and obedient girls could ‘cheerfully’ lay down their lives for the Fatherland today..
Come into the realm, demesne or domain & proverbial queen/ kingdom of the nominal Fifty-one thousand ecological regions of all there is of land & sea – these geographical regions of a notional 10k square kilometres, the conceptual sixth concentric circles of the conceptual notional 9-circle global economy.
For symmetry and theoremic neatness – should you be an Ayn Rand, Alan Greenspan, Nathaniel Branden Madison Avenue 1950s objectivist clockwork “universe” fanatic who also nurtures an insatiable appetite for 20th Century newspaper magnates,’ archbishops,’ and Grand Muftis’5,6 fully programmable electro- mechanical human beings like the pervert Freud Goebbelsian brother-in-law Edward Bernays in that same orgiastic there-are-no-rules heady White Race triumphalist venue please do some bloody work for once in your psycho-emotionally scattered privileged prestigious high-priced global political elites’ “Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics” lives – readers can posit and identify Circle 10 as Earth’s failing chemically devastated and literally entropic7 atmosphere, this a query612 billion cubic kilometre container – with soft pliable borders to say 12 km altitude – Troposphere. Earth’s troposphere extends from Earth’s surface to, on average, about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) in height, with its height lower at Earth’s poles … anyway first get a strong mental picture of the numbers & densities in mind per the below, with our thanks to daviddarling.info
Watch out for those lousy metaphors and reductio ad absurdum arguments – they’ll kill you stone-motherless dead every time.
Serving the dialectics of the damned and the wretched of the earth, or the erroneous and criminally malicious saws and aphorisms of the ruling elites we are not.
John Blundell, South Australia
Ideation & Behaviour Consciousness Neurolinguistics, Human Health, Authentic Green Economics ex Community Economist Publications Worldwide 1995 – 2003, Atmospheric & Weather-systems Studies, 2 – 5 Set Quantum Relational Logic, Philosophy of Science
Fighting gross accumulation into the heaving bleeding ground we are.
Tomorrow is the next day of the rest of your life. You’ll have to deal with this or butt out, ok?
1 Meinecke, Machiavellianisn, English trans. 1957, p371 in RV Sampson Equality& Power HEINEMANN BOOKS ON SOCIOLOGY General Editor : Donald Gunn Macrae1965
1A Anyone with vaguely passing knowledge of Harvard, MIT, Chicago School et cetera business management doctrines of the last 40 years will be familiar with the term Zero-sum Game, of obscure referencing but clearly about coercion, capture and mastery of the “If you’ve got them by the balls their hearts and minds will soon follow” type. The His increase + Your decrease @GretaThunberg b-l-a-h is obviously the geopolitical Zero Sum Game for Piagetian pre Formal Operations 11 year-old boys and girls
2 Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and the author of Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society and Technology as Magic: The Triumph of the Irrational.
3 That was CJDennis (Den) I think, circa 1910. ..born Auburn SA when it was the Magistrate’s town between the Burra & Moonta Mines, spawning grounds of the 90% Methodist Church early South Australian Labour Party (Jim Moss, Sound of Trumpets History of the Labour Movement in South Australia 1985), the Dandenongs Vic
4 ..a Hitler Jugend song, The Linden Tree was it?
5 For a frankly scary insight into Pichai Sundararajan/ Google-Alphabet’s literal NEW WORLD ORDER, the Billionaire Cabal’s systematic and evidently comprehensive deracinatory – unlinking with lived, ecological or historical reality in favour of neoclassical Pseudo-christian nonsense – deconstruction and ideational reconstruction of human society for business fun and profit please “google” ‘Cailiff.’ Horrific? Oh yes it is. To conduct a closely similar urgent publicly important exercise try finding out by web search what Ivan Ilich’s DESKILLING referrred to …see eg. this flagrant non-inadvertent but truly nefarious @Harvard Programmed Learning/ Geoffrey Hinton, Samuel Harris Altman Trumpite lie replicated a billion times over and splattered about the earth for eager students daily: “Deschooling Society is a 1971 book written by Austrian author Ivan Illich that critiques the role and practice of education in the modern world.”
6 To URGENTLY get a personal grasp of the neoliberal business profit-driven engineered polarisation of human society in its entirety see this:
Also please note the devastation wrought on scholarship and philosphy in ALL urbanised societies on Earth since the 3rd Century CE by the Parthian (Sasanian Empire) “prophet” Mani {note follows:Manichaeism teaches an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness.[8] Through an ongoing process that takes place in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of light, whence it came. Mani’s teaching was intended to “combine”,[9] succeed, and surpass the teachings of all the religions of the global North}. You may also see the superb scholarly @Wikipedia entry..
7 Growing our language so as to eliminate logical fallacies and to indeed in the language of my @X account @greeneconomyact eradicate the erroneous hat-rabbits of sophistry, technologism, econo-babble, irrelevant deflectionary science and huge-budget public relations razza : the 5 or 6 significantly varied usages of the term entropic, the ‘neoclasssical’ or perverse pop-culture, elites’ literary culture & communications information technology theory usages – a large topic and demanding another essay.. – in the meantime a couple of notes, the second with live links. This field of study is a figurative linguo-cultural bonanza at a moment in all recorded and researched history of Life on Earth when theoretical and geophysical terms of reference and modeling have clearly turned to anodyne mush & speechifying tosh from Hollow Men. Shortly in these studies I will also go to diachronous (the historical lines of all neoclassical research and pontification – ever and always HALF-RIGHT with the back end of each statement – typically glided over, downplayed or heavily disguised by all newsmedia & smugly ridiculous pompous academics – evaluative affective emotive OPINION – which in turn is always half-right – please read more thoughtfully, reflectively and maturely on the late Sir Karl Popper’s disproof science to achieve some philosophical maturity-of-view here – by which political leadership worldwide in its tragi-comic heroic economic triumphalist naive celebration of represented realities after 1920s Hollywood are literally taking humanity as a whole out the back (or front) door) and synchronous philology (Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss late 19th Century semiotician and philosopher) .
1) thermodynamics: a measure of the unavailable energy in a closed thermodynamic system that is also usually considered to be a measure of the system’s disorder, that is a property of the system’s state, and that varies directly with any reversible change in heat in the system and inversely with the temperature of the system. broadly: the degree of disorder or uncertainty in a system
2) One simple statement of the law is that heat always moves from hotter objects to colder objects (or “downhill”), unless energy in some form is supplied to reverse the direction of heat flow. Another definition is: “Not all heat energy can be converted into work in a cyclic process.”[1][2][3]
And here is the best a neurolinguistics scholar can do at this moment in human history to explain what are patently the pre-apocalyptic attitudinal and behavioural, Other-side and Right-side, RCHS & predominantly LCHS, ideational & USC executive scripts laid down for us by the jibbering madmen and folklorists of the European Dark Age pre 1509 CE..
(ii) Reason and Emotion of Inequality, an excerpt from RV Sampson Heinemann 1965
If reason is not an insulated, morally neutral attribute of [“]the mind[“], the question must be raised as to why there is no general agreement about the nature of moral referents. Is it not clear that there are unbridgeable gulfs between people, arising out of fundamental differences of valuable and intractable to rational resolution? The instance generally uppermost in people’s minds today is the contrast between Communist and Capitalist cultures.. it is not at all clear that the moral referents are significantly different – ther Other is guilty of tyranny, suppression of freedom, exploitation of the weak. The self is engaged in maximising the area of freedom, prosperity and justice to all for present and future generations.
Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that the principle of equality is not by any means [“]universally[“] accepted as morally binding. Nor are those who dissent self-evidently less intelligent or less sincere than those who differ with them. To the moral relativist this presents no problem. But the non-relativist, at the risk of appearing arrogant, is logically bound to account for the fact. To do what is right may not always be within my strength; but should it not be possible always to will what is right? But this too is very difficult. Wgere moral duty is sharply opposed to desire, and is accordingly painful, the mind has a fatal facilty for self-deception. It can easily manufacture ‘reasons’ which ‘convince,’ thereby protecting the psyche from truth that is painful, thus enabling it to believe what it wishes to believe. Freud expressed it as follows:
Our intelligence, they teach us, can function reliably only when it is removed from the influences of strong emotional impulses; otherwise it behaves merely as an instrument of the will and delivers the ideation which the will requires. Thus, in their view, logical arguments are impotent against affective interests, and that is why reasons, which in Falstaff’s phrase are ‘as plenty as blackberries,’ produce so few victories in the conflict with interests.1
โBoccaliniโs account of the significance of power for the politician is today paralleled by the role of the doctrine of raison dโรฉtat in the minds of contemporary students students of international diplomacy at strategy. The belief in the inevitability of Raison dโรฉtat with its reliance on violence and the threat of violence as the controlling force in human affairs is uncritically accepted. State power relations expressed in a dynamic equilibrium of terror have come to assume an independent life of their own.
โThe logic of the.. war against all, and itโs source in human greed and fear, has never been more succinctly expressed than in Treitschkeโs enunciation of the two essential tenets of Machiavellism.
โThey merit quotation in full, since they will be seen to go to the root of the matter.
โ 1. Your neighbour, even though [es sei denn] he may look upon you as his natural ally against another power which is feared by you both2 is always ready at the first opportunity, as soon as it can be done with safety, to better himself at your expense. He is forced to do it, if he is wise; and could not hold back, even if he were your brother.
โ 2. It is altogether insufficient for you to defend your own territory; on the contrary, you must keep your gaze fixed dispassionately on everything which could influence your situation, and you must in no way tolerate that anything inside these boundaries of your influence should be altered to your detriment, and never hesitate a moment, if you can order something there to your advantage. For you can rest assured that the other will do the same, whenever he can; and if you delay in doing it now on your side, then you will get behind him. Whoever fails to increase his power, must decrease it, if others increase theirs.3
John Blundell
Sociology Economy Neurolinguistics Philosophy of Science
South Australia 31/8/2023
1Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915 Coll. Papers, Vol. IV p. 303.. “Its [the ego’s] position midway between the id and reality tempts it only too often to become sycophantic, opportunist and false, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour
2 It is utterly essential in using this essay of mine as a learning tool that readers grasp that the Piagetian pre-teenage Concrete Operations and quasi autism spectrum cum Immediate-gratification-of-needs of addictive self-perpetuating Consumer Culture – falsely and perniciously called Youth Culture in mid 20C USA pop or ‘tabloid’ psychology mindset and developmental stage in every young persons’s life is perfectly exemplified in My friend’s enemy is my enemy – the ideological or cultural ‘bottom line’ of all crude zero-sum game dysregulated free-marketist or neoliberal business practice and enviro-social depradations
3 Meinecke, Machiavellianisn, English trans. 1957, p371 in RV Sampson Equality& Power HEINEMANN BOOKS ON SOCIOLOGY General Editor: Donald Gunn Macrae1965
Blundell Philosophy of Science Human Health New Neuroscience Economy
@karli_moon_ writes: โLast night I was abused by a racist lady at a science week event. She was yelling at me that nothing was ever written down about Aboriginal people so they aren’t scientists & also ‘always was always will be’ can’t be proven. I’m still in shock.โ
Mental Health Services in Australia are what again ?
Now whoโs upset, some Post Fact lunatic in the Australian Government or Mr Musk, Sir??
Here I went again. The first time was for suggesting really politely but admittedly with malice aforethought that Senator Rand Paul – a mining on Alpha Centauri chap – Sweet Jesus do some of these tree-biting loonies know how to get up John Blundellโs noseโ๏ธ – should do away with himself. Donโt ask me what the second suspension was for (February 2022) – itโs just too mindlessly TS Eliot HOLLOW MEN b-o-r-i-n-g ok? ..this time my offence was to state that Gina Hancock should be ignored and dismissed out of hand for her gravely ill-advised free advertising for Westinghouse Nuclear (also their utterly useless and totally redundant 1980s era $1.5 million Spinning Reserve Gas-burner Machines (replaced by GRID-FORMING inverters and the array of new Alternating Current system maintenance protection diversion instantaneous-restoration and supplementation from now 2-4 hour industry-scale batteries and other electronic services..
Life is now desperately too short for public relations crap and tittle-tattle and weโve ALL got to get on with the grown-upsโ stuff as you good people know only too well.
Oh Elon. oh Bilbo !
โฆ As he came into the window It was the sound of a crescendo He came into her apartment He left the bloodstains on the carpet She ran underneath the table He could see she was unable So she ran into the bedroom She was struck down It was her doom
โฆ Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie? Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie? Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie? Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?
โฆ Annie, are you okay? Will you tell us that you’re okay? There’s a sign in the window That he struck you – a crescendo, Annie He came into your apartment He left the bloodstains on the carpet Then you ran into the bedroom You were struck down It was your doom
โฆ Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?
โฆ You’ve been hit by You’ve been hit by a smooth criminal Ow!
โฆ Ow!
โฆ Aw! Annie, are you okay? (I don’t know) Will you tell us that you’re okay? (I don’t know) There’s a sound at the window (I don’t know) Then he struck you, a crescendo Annie? (I don’t know) He came into your apartment (I don’t know) Left bloodstains on the carpet (I don’t know why, baby) And then you ran into the bedroom (help me) You were struck down It was your doom Annie (dag gone it)
โฆ Annie, are you okay? So, Annie, are you okay? Are you okay, Annie?
โฆ You’ve been hit by You’ve been hit by a smooth criminal
Charlemagne – extraordinarily useful Mastermind Quiz entrantโs Google Alphabet note appears below (1)Ghislane Maxwell, Media Magnateโs daughter, Rock Spider & a President Good Old Pastor Shouty (2)
John Blundell
Economy Health New Neurolinguistics Philosophy of Science
(2) I just thought people might have forgotten this stalwart for federation demolition (as evidently gleefully and ALARMINGLY imitated under the dead hands and tin ears of the Anthony Albanese Government) and getting stuck into those Squinty ๐s, Mozzlemms and stuff, for old God
Thanks to Ketan Joshi whose graph outing the BS of big #oil’s #CCS ploy got me and the whole Climate & Capital Media team thinking about the dangers of the many false shiny objects posing as #climate solutions. Here’s our “Ten climate โsolutionsโ that donโt help – Many shiny new โgreenโ ideas do more to preserve fossil fuels than to replace it.” We start off with the mother of all distractions Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and wrap with the endlessly distracting, Traditional fission nuclear power.
See what you think? And what did we miss?
Project Drawdown Tim Buckley International Energy Agency (IEA) Fortescue Future Industries ExxonMobil Shell
My thanks to the preparers of this authoritative presentation.
Itโs collaboration – economists will immediately realise the absolute antithesis of what was actually unabashedly called Competition Policy in the Milton Friedman 1990s – or a โhell-on-earthโ neoliberalism collapse and meltdown of human society now.
John BLUNDELL Neurolinguistics Health and Philosophy of Science South Australiaโs thanks are conveyed to all contributors in climate education and this Ten โSolutionsโ article from Climate & Capital Team..
Professor Dame Angela McLean DBE FRS Government Chief Scientific Adviser ( GCSA ).
Many shiny new โgreenโ ideas do more to preserve fossil fuels than to replace it
The world continues to face a major obstacle to addressing the climate crisis: deliberate distraction with a proliferation of new whiz-bang technologies and ideas. Some are well-intentioned, some are strategic, some delusional, but most are outright greenwash to justify the continued use of fossil fuels and to distract from the inevitable move to less expensive renewable energy.
Historically, this innovation and testing would have been carried out at research universities funded by government grants with a commitment to finding the best and most useful solutions. Today, much of this work is sponsored by individual businesses or sectors โ notably, by coal, oil and gas companies.
An entire suite of bad ideas is being pushed by a fossil fuel industry determined to slow global efforts to decarbonize. This week the Climate & Capital team looks at some of these โshiny objectsโ distracting the world from forming effective climate solutions.
Chevronโs Gorgon Project. Source: Chevron
1. The mother of all distractions: Carbon Capture and Storage
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has long been touted by the fossil fuel sector as THE answer to their enormous greenhouse gas emissions problem. CCS (not to be confused with direct air capture of carbon) involves collecting CO2 from power plants and then injecting it underground, or using it for some other industrial purpose.
Sources like Saudi Arabian negotiatorsand former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson argue for developing carbon capture technology while pushing back against efforts by the G20 industrialized nations to phase out fossil fuels.
An entire suite of bad ideas is being pushed by a fossil fuel industry determined to slow global efforts to decarbonize.
Forget the hype. This is the reality of the contribution of CCS to reduce emissions today: virtually nil.
Consider this simple chart created by energy researcher Ketan Joshi comparing emissions generated by gas and oil giants (black bars) to those avoided by relying on CCS technology (green) and another questionable solution, โcarbon offsetsโ (purple).
Not convinced? Consider there are 196 CCS projects globally โin the pipeline,โ with 30 in operation, 11 under construction, 153 in development and two suspended. The carbon capture capacity of all of these projects is estimated to be only around 242 million tons per year. The International Energy Agency (IEA) sayscapacity needs to reach 1.6 billion tons per year for the technology to be effective.
Attempts to build power plants using CCS are also numbingly expensive and, so far, have all but failed. Oil giant Chevron recently acknowledged its flagship CCS project built in 2017 off the northwest coast of Australia is operating at just one-third of its capacity because of problems at the facility.
Tim Buckley, director of Climate Energy Finance and contributor to Climate & Capital, says Chevronโs admissions are an indictment of the technology: โDismal operating performance since [the plant] opened six years ago shows the technology has little future.โ Buckley notes that most carbon sequestration worldwide is โaimed at extracting more oil and gas from reservoirs.โ
Iron ore magnate and passionate climate solution technology investor Andrew โTwiggyโ Forrest lashed out at CCS recently, saying itโs a failed technology and a ploy created by oil and gas companies so they can continue extracting fossil fuels, In short, an industry โjust waiting for the next idiot to come along.โ
Bottom line: CCS is an expensive, ineffective technology being used to extend the useful life of fossil fuels, and masquerading as a climate change solution.
Time to move on.
Denbury Inc. pipeline. Source: Denbury
2. Deceptively distracting: Dirty hydrogen branded as โcleanโ by its proponents
Hydrogen, when used in a fuel cell, is clean, producing only water as a byproduct. But donโt be fooled. The so-called โclean hydrogenโ โ we will call it by its true name โdirty hydrogenโ โ is being promoted by the oil industry to keep burning toxic methane gas.
According to the IEA, 6% of global natural gas and 2% of global coal now goes to hydrogen production, a threefold increase since 1975. And that is expected to keep rising. Dirty hydrogen is an anti-climate solution. Production of hydrogen, the IAE says, is responsible for annual greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of CO2 emissions of the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined.
Carbon capture and dirty hydrogen forms the bedrock of ExxonMobilโs strategy to extend the lifespan of fossil fuels.
The fossil fuel industry would have you believe that the solution to this is also, you guessed it, CCS! The worldโs largest non-government oil producer, ExxonMobil, has said it needs carbon capture in order to develop methane-fueled hydrogen.
Carbon capture and dirty hydrogen forms the bedrock of ExxonMobilโs strategy to extend the lifespan of fossil fuels. Last month it paid $4 billion to acquire Denbury Inc., which uses the largest carbon dioxide pipeline network in the U.S. to extract more petroleum from existing oil fields.
And surprise, surprise, Exxonโs purchase could not have happened without new carbon dioxide tax subsidies from the U.S Inflation Reduction Act.
โCCS is an enabler of hydrogen until such time as weโre able to cost-effectively produce green hydrogen,โ according to the company.
Source: Shutterstock
3. Net nothing: 2050 Net Zero targets
If there is one blindingly obvious conclusion from this summerโs disastrous weather, it is that we are running out of time. This calls into question conventional wisdom to rely on squishy climate targets to create a โnet zeroโ balance of releasing new carbon in the atmosphere with โsequestering,โ or taking other carbon out of the atmosphere.
Net zero was always a compromise idea hashed out at the last minute at COP21 in Paris in 2015. It represented progress, yes, because it got nations to agree to a roadmap to reduce carbon emissions and send a signal that fossil fuels were over.
Sure it is impressive that almost two thirds of the 2,000 largest publicly traded companies in the world have now made corporate commitments, according to Net Zero Tracker. But so what? So far the result seems to have a perverse effect of delaying climate action by creating targets so far in the future that present corporate leadership cannot be held accountable for ever meeting those targets. A recent white paper โAvoid greenwashing and get the claims rightโ by the Finnish start-up Compensate โ Getting the Claims Right โ says corporate climate claims such as carbon neutrality, climate neutrality, and net zero structure โwhile usefulโ offer little transparency in how these terms are defined.
Source: Unsplash
4. BS: Chevronโs โrenewableโ cow dung
Chevron has a great idea and is pumping millions of dollars of advertising (in Semafor, The New York Times, etc.) to promote โrenewable natural gasโ (RNG). It is โrenewableโ because it uses cow manure. Seriously. They call the process โanaerobic digestion.โ
Not only is it not really โrenewableโ in the same sense as wind, solar or hydroelectric power, it will have no real impact on global warming. Why? It is wildly expensive to make. RNG is five times as expensive as traditional fossil-produced gas.
Chevron markets it as a means of reducing โlife cycle carbon intensityโ (another meaningless concept made up by the oil and gas marketers) โwhile meeting the worldโs growing energy needs.โ The company says itโs all โpart of Chevronโs portfolio of technologies and solutions.โ
Bottom line: โRenewable natural gasโ is Chevron PR โ an effort to give their business a green veneer while staving off regulations that would curtail gas consumption.
Source: INDYCAR
5. Silly: Renewable race fuel
Shell is currently working with INDYCAR to develop โ100% renewableโ fuel for race cars on the track at the Indianapolis 500. The fuel is largely ethanol derived from sugarcane waste in Brazil, resulting in a 60% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions for the event (compared to 2005), according to Shell.
If itโs true that this fuel โis going to be used by all the cars on the gridโ in the future, as the companyโs promotional videosuggests, that would mean Shell could phase out most of its gasoline-based fossil fuel business, right?
Racing fuels like RNG are just one of many promotional gimmicks used by fossil fuel producers to distract consumers from the problems of continued oil and gas production.
But imagine scaling sugarcane production to meet global demand for 100% ethanol โfor all carsโ โ an effort that would most certainly accelerate deforestation in places like the Amazon, worsening global warming.
Racing fuels like RNG are just one of many promotional gimmicks used by fossil fuel producers to distract consumers from the problems of continued oil and gas production.
Source: Exxon
6. Embarrassing: Exxonโs Ill-fated green algae gas
Hereโs another one. You may have seen the Exxon ad featuring earnest looking scientists as โenergy farmersโ with the company claiming it is harvesting algae to produce โrenewable biofuels.โ
After more than a decade, and an investment of $350 million on the project and another $60 million on advertising, Exxon dropped the initiative late last year saying, โWe need to get on the deployment curve for carbon capture for hydrogen [and] biofuels. Algae still needs some more work,โ Exxon told Bloomberg. Coincidently, a few months later, Exxon spent $4 billion for a carbon capture pipeline (see above).
Why did Exxon and other oil companies drop the algae solution? Itโs a no brainer. Spending billions on a โrenewableโ project like Denbury prolongs the use of fossil fuels while cooking up an algae alternative does the opposite. An algae-based biofuels, Exxon says, had not been able to generate enough energy to compete with highly subsidized fossil fuels โ and has no carbon capture subsidy benefits.
ADNOC Ruwais refinery. Source: ADNOC
7. Most intense distraction: โLeast carbon intensiveโ oil and gas from Saudi Arabia and the UAE
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are competing to be known as the โleast carbon intensiveโ producers of fossil fuel. The goal? Help solve the climate crisis? Of course not. Itโs to monopolize oil production and eliminate โdirtierโ competitors like pesky Texan natural gas frackers or tar sands oil producers from Oman and Canada.
First they paid for a dubious study that โprovedโ the worldโs second-largest oil producer had the most climate-friendly oil and gas because it emitted less methane, and required less energy to extract and process. Such hair splitting is also being used by the UAE to justify increasing annual oil and gas production to 7 billion barrels by 2030 from 5 billion barrels now.
Itโs why, says UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE is a โresponsible supplier of energy,โ and is needed to โcontinue playing this role for as long as the world is in need of oil and gas.โ
Weโd suggest that that time is rapidly running out.
Source: Saudi Middle East Green Initiatives
9. Mostannoying: A 50 billion tree planting project
In 2021, Saudi Arabia unveiled plans to plant 10 billion trees at home and another 40 billion across the Middle East. Yes, 50 billion! Planting trees is good โ they provide shade, habitat, erosion control, water retention, carbon capture and more. But massive tree planting projects have often fallen short of their promises. Failure to keep trees alive is one major problem. Massive, single species tree planting projects have messed with biodiversity and died off from insect infestations, fires and drought.
Big tree projects tend to be a cover for doing business as usual. Accounting and reporting on the success of tree planting projects has proven dubious. A report by Oxfam says using land for tree planting to achieve carbon neutrality is โalmost impossibleโ and would require all the farmland on earth to be forested.
Also a challenge, Saudi Arabia doesnโt have the labor force to plant trees with millions of migrant workers from poorer countries filling its much needed blue collar ranks. Nor does it have the water: more than half of the kingdomโs drinking water already comes from desalination plants.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, has announced plans to increase crude oil production and export through 2025. We donโt know whether the Saudisโ planned 50 billion trees might offer shade across the region one day decades from now. But the plan sure does provide PR cover for ramping up oil production.
Source: Georgia Power
10. Endlessly distracting: Traditional fission nuclear power
If you have seen the film Oppenheimer, you can understand that nuclear energy has challenges. The only thing that is more terrifying than going extinct from the climate crisis is going extinct by nuclear annihilation.
When it comes to cost and speed to market there is no competition between solar and nuclear. Unless subsidized, nuclear always loses on both counts.
No matter how hard the nuclear industry tries, it is impossible to separate nuclear fission and nuclear bombs. Nuclear energy from uranium or plutonium have always been โatoms for peaceโ and the core fuel for thermonuclear bonds.
That means as long as fission nuclear plants are built, there will be concerns about nuclear proliferation, how to store highly radioactive waste, and the potential for nuclear meltdown. To wit: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima and now, the wartime threat to Ukraineโs nuclear reactors.
Ok, letโs say you waved that all away with your magical wand. Now there is the ugly economics of nuclear power. When it comes to cost and speed to market there is no competition between solar and nuclear. Unless subsidized, nuclear always loses on both counts.
This week, for example, the first new nuclear power plant in decades in the U.S. is now at full power at Georgia Power Co. after years of delays and billions in cost overruns. Total cost for the plant is $25 billion โ 75% more than the original estimated pricetag of $14.3 billion. Compare that to new solar development of a similar size: The Phoebe Solar Project in Texas, now under construction, is projected to cost $397 million and to take less than one year to bring online.
Unless you are a government with no profit incentive, donโt bet on nuclear.
Our team aims to lead in the vibrant conversation taking place among entrepreneurs, climate scientists, investors, NGOs, policymakers and corporate leaders around climate change. Whatโs driving that discussion is a shared realization that building a sustainable future is both a moral imperative and an economic opportunity with potentially exponential returns for our portfolios and most importantly, our planet.
With our thanks to Adam Tooze the new-era sub stack activist โ Dedicated World History Person awake and not in the death-grip of psychotic headbanging Pollyanna-ism.
Monolithic academic NEOCLASSICAL folkloric conversational #Scienceโฆ โhow freshwater from the ice sheet might impact the circulation of the Southern Ocean and its marine ecosystems is one of Antarcticaโs best kept secrets. Because the continentโs subglacial hydrology plays a key role in moving that water, Siegfried also emphasized the ice sheetโs connection to the rest of the planet. โIt’s not just the ice sheet we’re talking about,โ Siegfried said. โWe’re really talking about a water system that is connected to the whole Earth systemโ โฆis your enemy, your childrenโs enemy, your grandchildrenโs enemyand will with even 10 bn. tonnes of fossil fuel ๐ฅ-ing per yearguarantee you have NO great grandchildren(1)
Thatโs โwhat ever you want in the future is a commercial space industry not a government space industry,โ goes this fat shiny Donald Trump fuck.
Please GRASP dear Australian reader that the Anthony Albanese government granted $4m to Seppo shysters to survey for minerals way up in the sky, another $1.2mn. to some mob called Space Agency to oversee this whole bloody Apocalypse Now Donald Trump/ Narrendra Modi moonshots charade and that the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) is a thing (2)
Here was X-Twitterโs @greeneconomyact this morning 3/8/2023: โUH-OH here we go, Southern Australians. Severe winter weather approaching WA – note this @weatherzone report out of the @MonashUni Climate Studies group is 20 hours old weatherzone.com.au/news/severe-wiโฆ Getting complacent huh? MMGH a Northern Hemis thang huh. Dear goodness have we got news for youโผ๏ธโ
“In a new paper titled “Systematic review of the actual emissions reductions of carbon offset projects across all major sectors” carried out in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, we estimate that only 12% of the offset certificates purchased lead to actual reductions in emissions.โ From the hard-working-for-humanity Ketan Joshi1 in the last week of July 2023 – do Weather Systems and Global Heating you will know of Ketan โ – do life-on-earth in any personal capacity but the interior of some hermetically-sealed (whoops) plastic bubble and you will have known the last week of July 2023 โ – On a quick past-work review last night I was reminded – three days I think I recall short of the 29th anniversary of the worst early Spring excessive solar radiation assault – two years after the Montreal Protocol – an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out the production of numerous substances that are responsible for ozone depletion – on the bare skin of my arms in since my birth – that three months ago here (on Billionaire Monkeys with Typewriters ) I referred to โsulphurous dust storms and boiling seasโ as where we were headed in the finance worldโs Long Term (that is the mid-to late 2030s and not last week for Christโs Sake. I wrote about the BS faux pas on @greeneconomyact/ GREEN ECONOMIST๎จProgressives.. Iโve also written appealing to Australian liberal centrist MPs Allegra Spender and Zali Steggall to never just read stuff & always reflect on the undesirability of coming across to largely disconsolate and certainly unhappy feeling-cheated audience or public as a goose.
And please donโt address the ubiquitous idiot insapient head-banger tree-biting rich as though they need childish or fantastic imagery to prick their consciences – itโs a false impression you may have picked up from the ACCPA & Hillsong that these guys actually purr & coo when you patronise the shitter out of them with baby talk – theyโre actually grinding their teeth and working out how to kill you like blessed Clare Nowland of Yallambee Lodge in Cooma NSW on the 24th of May..
..in the Northern Hemisphere by Internet communications sure – as remote from us as can be (chortle/ guffaw/ fart loudly) but wait, pause and listen, because with Australian newsmedia at the mercy of oil, gas,โข๏ธ and Flying Motorcars-๐-โ๏ธ-๐ค neokeynesian econometrics ghouls, tools and madmen, with journalists under pain of instant dismissal, demotion, or being put in charge of some ludicrous โCome on Downโ show, or a Books & Writing show in a post-fact era of conversational masculinist vaguely coercive romance, subtle overtones of menace, grunty bits, adventure, exploration, bushcraft, discovery, domestic vegan recycling/ re-using/ refusing/ refurbishing million-dollar homes plus f…tons of functionally useless & ecologically hostile Science Technology Engineering & Maths (3) or a โBig Ideasโ show for Public Intellectuals (it means podcasters, pop psychologists, advertising copy-writers, business grifters, evangelical spinouts & wtf Malcolm Gladwell Tipping Point bad mechanomorphic metaphors that actually refer to the awesome process of gathering Mark Zuckerberg Likes and Love Hearts in a BIGLY RUSH OOOWH Influenced/ ers) or overnight talkback radio..
Most would have heard nothingof alarming 18-19ยฐC maxima across Tasmania (+ NZ + southern South America + Namibia) in the second week of July or of an apparently disrupted ski season at Perisher (eastern Australia Great Dividing Range) last week.
Go easy on the mathematics, it’s very good fun if you do the right kind – not particularly letter-conjunctor-number coding but what might well be called the Small or 2 – 5 part Language Model – or more accurately & usefully (as we shall have to remind ourselves daily in our futures of the micro-macro dialectic of conscious meaning in the new world of deliberative ideation-empowered action that may enable the realisation of any @UN sustainable development goals) the Micro LM – valid interlocked read-in-any-order sequentia – no time travel, black holes, sub-atomic particles, no Adenosine 5โฒ-tetrahydrogen triphosphate (4), not even the Einstein theorem about light, velocity, mass and energy, or any mental meanderings in the particular or the general (macro) – more mental agility and coherence than plodding calculation; by computer with what is now McLuhanโs virtual Gutenberg Galaxy in as much as itโs an inexplicably vast, unbelievably energy-profligate galaxy-scale accumulation of letter-conjunctor-number or nucleoside triphosphates and stuff – or indeed any gross accumulation of objects – or money – you got that: we need to talk about the macro..
Yes, me advertising my neurocognitive wares again. Unabashed. Bent on worldwide re-imagination. This is it, the mental crash-tackle on academic neoclassicism with a special note of thanks to Professor Alfred Tarski of the State University of New York Buffalo not ๐ฆฌ 1908. – inspired by the interdependent inextricably intertwined un-particularisable quantum relations 2 – 5 set dynamism that I think Niels Bohr grasped. at least intuitively.
Here a famous study in ripe high-sugar apple stem tissue breakdown senescence – it figures, of course One of Southern Europeโs Mathematicians: Just look at those stressed-out eyes kidsโฆ.What is succinct and apposite? ..SOUGHT TO INTERPRET THE ENTIRE PHYSICAL WORLD IN TERMS OF NUMBERS
The teaching most securely identified with Pythagoras is metempsychosis, or the “transmigration of souls”, which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. He may have also devised the doctrine of musica universalis, which holds that the planets move according to mathematicalequations and thus resonate to produce an inaudible symphony of music. Scholars debate whether Pythagoras developed the numerological and musical teachings attributed to him, or if those teachings were developed by his later followers, particularly Philolaus of Croton. Following Croton’s decisive victory over Sybaris in around 510 BC, Pythagoras’s followers came into conflict with supporters of democracy, and Pythagorean meeting houses were burned. Pythagoras may have been killed during this persecution, or he may have escaped to Metapontum and died there.
Our readers will forgive me for relaying and parlaying text about Pythagoras (he 2.5k years ago on the other side of the world) from @Wilkipedia in the context of their striving to understand philosophy and crazy-arsed enlightenment/ romance/ industrial era metaphysics – every idea humans conceive or dream at the rate of arguably 10 per second – much slower when asleep – because weโre really being driven to oblivion by neoliberal no-government free criminal enterprise lunatics and need the ammunition & rational argument to eradicate these arseholes and dreaming is of course a divine recharging of the human fighting spirit. – Healing takes itโs time. Every night. Nice.
In antiquity, Pythagoras was credited with many mathematical and scientific discoveries, including the Pythagorean theorem, Pythagorean tuning, the five regular solids, the Theory of Proportions, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus. It was said that he was the first man to call himself a philosopher (“lover of wisdom”)[c] and that he was the first to divide the globe into five climatic zones. Classical historians debate whether Pythagoras made these discoveries, and many of the accomplishments credited to him likely originated earlier or were made by his colleagues or successors. Some accounts mention that the philosophy associated with Pythagoras was related to mathematics and that numbers were important, but it is debated to what extent, if at all, he actually contributed to mathematics or natural philosophy.
Pythagoras influenced Plato, whose dialogues, especially his Timaeus, exhibit Pythagorean teachings. Pythagorean ideas on mathematical perfection also impacted ancient Greek art. His teachings underwent a major revival in the first century BC among Middle Platonists, coinciding with the rise of Neopythagoreanism. Pythagoras continued to be regarded as a great philosopher throughout the Middle Ages and his philosophy had a major impact on scientists such as Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. Pythagorean symbolism was used throughout early modern European esotericism, and his teachings as portrayed in Ovid‘s Metamorphoses influenced the modern vegetarian movement.
Wha.. Next stop the Vatican Secrets of Numerology, GPS, Mercatorial Navigation, radio tags on small animals, counting everything 4,230 timesโฆ Eeeeyyaaaahhgggg
JOHN BLUNDELL
Economy\ Health\ Philosophy of Science
On GREEN ECONOMIST Eradicate ๎จ- & Newsmedia -Junk Time/ @greeneconomyact
2 Regarding CCZ you may see some terse acid observations on @greeneconomyact 08082023
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4 Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is the source of energy for use and storage at the cellular level. The structure of ATP is a nucleoside triphosphate, consisting of a nitrogenous base (adenine), a ribose sugar, and three serially bonded phosphate groups./ 13 Feb 2023
Billionaire-๐๐๐๐s with Olivettis 