date:20050405



Jones Beene wrote:
Very authoritative article
in:

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_1_nuclear_power.html

Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power
Peter W. Huber, Mark P. Mills
Mark Mills is a consummate idiot. I doubt that anything he says is
authoritative, although even a stopped (analog) clock is right twice a
day. Or maybe Huber has the smarts. See:
J. G. Koomey et al., Rebuttal to Testimony on Kyoto and the
Internet: The Energy Implications of the Digital Economy, LBNL- 46509,
Energy Analysis Department, Environmental Energy Technologies Division,
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, August 2000,
enduse.LBL.gov/Projects/InfoTech.html
J. Rothwell, New Urban Myth About Energy Pervades Highest Levels of
Government, Infinite Energy Magazine Issue 37
J. Rothwell, Mark Mills Cound Not Have Got It More Wrong,
Infinite Energy Magazine
Issue 42
I have not looked at this article closely, but I see the authors avoided
the issue of uranium mining and dismissed the disposal problem. Uranium
is so spread out in the environment that mining it is almost as
destructive as mining coal. It is only concentrated after you
refine the ore.
This statement:
The power has to come from somewhere. Sun and wind will never come
close to supplying it.
. . . is complete nonsense. The sun and wind could supply a hundred times
more energy than we consume. With space based solar energy, it could
supply enough to vaporize the planet. Cost is the only issue.
- Jed

Re: [OT] The Next Pope

WAY off topic. A comment in today's Atlanta Journal:
Why do the Cardinals get to pick the new pope? They lost the World Series!
- Jed

Re: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power

- Original Message - 
From: Jed Rothwell

 I have not looked at this article closely, but I see the
authors avoided  the issue of uranium mining and dismissed
the disposal problem. Uranium is  so spread out in the
environment that mining it is almost as destructive as
mining coal. It is only concentrated after you refine the
ore.

...sure, but...

The problem of overlooking very significant incidental
'problems' to prove a point goes ways ;-)

The refining of the structural materials for windmills, or
the silicon for solar cells, are both dirty processes
which demand lots of coal (unless nuclear is substituted as
the source of energy for refining. These energy sources also
create huge secondary environmental problems because of the
tonnage of discarded ore and coal emissions  - all the more
so because these end-processes, wind and solar, are of
relatively low energy density.

Has anyone ever calculated the environmental burden to the
ecology caused by the tons of steel required for a windmill?
My bet is that if this is done, nuclear will look very
favorable in comparison because of its extraordinarily high
energy-density, compared to these two, which are low
energy-density.

But again, the issue should not be framed as either--or
when it comes to these three very desirable energy
resources -- as we need all the extra solar, wind and
nuclear we can put in place - but in the proper balance, as
they are ALL highly preferable to burning fossil fuels.

IOW let's do a total energy balance, realizing that when we
strip mine coal to make lots of silicon, then the few ppm or
natural radioactivity in the coal (or natural gas) get
dumped directly into the atmosphere in small particulates
where it can do the most harm. In terms of cancer risk, the
burning of coal is infinitely more damaging to humans than
having a moth-balled nuclear plant, which releases nothing
into the atmosphere, or the occasional Three Mile Island,
which posed a de minimis risk to health.

My contention is that it is futile - and really
counter-productive for the dedicated proponents of wind
and/or solar energy to fight nuclear. These people should be
allies, not adversaries.

This unfortunate situation cause confusion which is playing
directly into the hands of the petrocracy.

Instead, environmentalist should unite - and realize that
yes, nuclear is a good, if not the best, overall
environmental option- and all ought to be joining together
and combining resources against the real enemy: which is
fossil fuels, and especially coal.

IMHO the best thing to do with coal is to convert it into
carbon structural fiber and use that fiber to replace steel,
which cannot be made without coke - which is an extremely
dirty and damaging process. The best thing to do with
natural gas is to likewise convert it into plastics. Use
wind, solar, and nuclear to provide the energy to do the
conversion of these - and everybody is happy (except the
steel mills which have mostly moved to China anyway).

Jones

RE: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power

2005-04-05 Thread Keith Nagel

Jed writes:
Mark Mills is a consummate idiot.

Be fair; he's not an idiot, just a shill for the nuclear industry.
He says what they want to hear, and no doubt if you looked into
the funding of his think-tank you'll find GE and all the usual
suspects. I could find no list of donors on the institutes
website; shouldn't they be proud of their supporters???

Consider just this one howler from the linked article.

The Chernobyl disaster seven years later drove the final nail
into the nuclear coffin. It didnt matter that the Three Mile
Island containment vessel had done its job and prevented any
significant release of radioactivity, or that Soviet reactors
operated within a system that couldnt build a safe toaster oven.

Here the author implies that the Chernobyl accident was due to
some major fault in the reactor design and implementation, carefully
ignoring the fact that the real accident, as it occurred in the
real world that you and I live in, was due to technicians shutting
off all of the fail-safe systems and intentionally driving the reactor
to failure. Could the reactor have been designed better? Sure.
In fact, the current reactor could be redesigned so it is
impossible to override the failsafe systems. You could
weld the switches closed, although eventually someone would
dig under the control panel and cut the switches open
with a pair of side cutters. Here in the real world, humans
do these things. In the idealized world of Mark Mills,
they are a sort of Nietzcheian supermen who never screw
up or do stupid things. How do I get a ticket to this amazing
world he lives in Presumably some special Kool-Aid is
involved...

The author also claims that, opposed to the former SU, we _can_ build
a safe toaster oven. I have a toaster oven in my kitchen, produced
by the American company Black and Decker. It was recalled due to
the design being inherently unsafe; the heating element is placed
right below the door so when you reach in for your toast, you
can burn the top of your hand. I'm careful now with the oven, and never
got around to returning it, but just about everyone who uses
it gets burned at some point. In the UberAmerica of Mark Mills,
my toaster has never existed. All products here work perfectly,
as do our power generation equipment. Perhaps Mark was out of
town last summer when the grid failed and a few million New Yorkers
had to walk back to Brooklyn in the dark. Maybe he was on a GE funded
junket to Thailand???

If the author thinks that nuclear power is safe, he should open an
insurance company immediately and start insuring new plants. No other
insurance firm will do this, because unlike the mighty statiticians
of the Manhattan Institute, they feel the risk far outweights the
potential revenue. You would think someone who pays so much lip service
to the free market would actually listen to what that free market
has to say. But hey, if he did, his funding would dry up.

K.

Re: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power



Jones Beene wrote:
The refining of the structural
materials for windmills, or
the silicon for solar cells, are both dirty processes
which demand lots of coal (unless nuclear is substituted as
the source of energy for refining.
That's not true. You can use electricity from windmills or silicon to
refine the materials needed to make more windmills (or solar cells). The
only thing you need coal for is to convert iron ore to steel, but you
need this with a nuclear reactor too, and nuclear reactors use much more
steel than windmills do, per KW of capacity.
Furthermore, the energy payback time for a wind turbine is the lowest of
any conventional energy source. It takes about 3 months for a wind tower
to produce enough energy to manufacture another tower. It takes about 6
months or a year for a fossil fuel, and about 2 years for a nuclear
plant. Wind towers will probably last much longer than conventional
plants; 100 years versus 20 to 50 years. (The turbine engines and blades
will last ~20 years, but the tower consumes most of the construction
energy.)
Solar cells are much worse. Some do not pay back at all. Others take
about half the total useful lifetime of the cell to pay back. Solar cells
should be thought of as batteries rather than a source of energy.
However, it is the silicon that is energy intensive, and it is mostly
scrap silicon from the computer chip business, so it would be thrown away
otherwise. You might compare this to burning waste from computer chip
factories (except that it produces no pollution, of course). If solar
production expanded there would not be enough scrap silicon.

These energy sources
also
create huge secondary environmental problems because of the
tonnage of discarded ore and coal emissions - all the more
so because these end-processes, wind and solar, are of
relatively low energy density.
Wind has high energy density. A large modern wind turbine generates up to
10 MW, as much as a large helicopter engine, or twice as much as a modern
railroad locomotive. Comparing the footprint of the wind
tower, this is the highest energy density of any energy source. Comparing
the 3-dimensional mass of tower or the number of tons of concrete gives a
different answer, but this not relevant. Measured in useful land, the
footprint of offshore wind turbines is zero. All of the electricity and
all of the automobiles in Europe could easily be powered by offshore wind
in the North Sea. Wind in the U.S. could easily generate more energy than
all of the oil fields in the Middle East now do, even with today's
technology, and much more with ultra-high towers. The mid-east oil fields
are not at peak capacity, with no reserve, and they will soon begin a
rapid decline, whereas U.S. wind resources will last as long as the sun
shines.

Has anyone ever calculated the
environmental burden to the
ecology caused by the tons of steel required for a
windmill?
Yes. This has been done extensively. Mark Mills and others have
misrepresented these calculations, especially by claiming that wind
turbines kill birds. Actually, thermal generators (coal and nuclear) kill
millions of birds, whereas nobody has ever seen a modern, tall, slow wind
turbine kill a single bird. Birds are evolved to avoid things like
turbines and trees waving in the wind. They did not do well with 1970s
vintage wind turbines with low, rapidly turning blades, but they have no
difficulty avoiding the big ones.
Aircraft of all sorts also kill millions of birds, and birds sometimes
destroy aircraft. See:

http://www.birdstrike.org/
- Jed

Re: [OT] The Next Pope

2005-04-05 Thread [EMAIL PROTECTED]


Was not Peter and Paul both Jews first then Christ  converts.
  Ges-

RE: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power

Keith Nagel wrote:
Jed writes:
Mark Mills is a consummate idiot.
Be fair; he's not an idiot, just a shill for the nuclear industry.
Is he? A few years ago he was shilling for the coal industry at the 
Greening Earth Society. That organization, paid for by the coal industry, 
is *in favor of* global warming. At least they are honest! They agree that 
coal is causing global warming, but they claim global warming will benefit 
mankind. (Except for places such as Florida, New York City or Bangladesh I 
suppose, but the Greening Earth people are not detail-oriented; they look 
at the big picture.)

It is as if the tobacco companies were to advertise themselves as a potent 
solution to the Social Security funding problem -- which, in fact, they 
are. If enough people begin smoking again the Social Security fund will not 
run short in 2040 or anytime this century, because people will die off more 
quickly.

Not to get off topic, you could accomplish the same thing by raising the 
retirement age 2 years now, and 5 years by 2040. That strikes me as the 
obvious solution. People are living longer and they are healthier, so why 
shouldn't they work? Most of the elderly people I know are electrochemists 
and farmers, and they all would prefer work until they day they drop dead 
anyway. They will work just as hard for free, or at a loss.

- Jed

Re: Coaxial Capacitor Thrustor

At 7:22 PM 4/5/5, John Berry wrote:
Great analysis.
It should work IMO even if the forces are as Ampere states unless there
is no displacement current,
[snip]

There is always a displacement current, even between vacuum plates.  The
displacement current is eactly equal to the current to the capacitor,
regardless of the presence of a dielectric or not.

Regards,

Horace Heffner

OFF TOPIC Demography and cigarettes



I wrote:
If enough people begin smoking
again the Social Security fund will not run short in 2040 or anytime this
century, because people will die off more quickly.
There is a great deal of confusion about demography and health, so let me
add that cigarettes are ideal for knocking off old people soon
after they begin collecting Social Security, in their 70s. Most U.S.
health problems affect younger people, especially infants. Violence and
AIDS kill teenagers and people in their 20s. So they do nothing to reduce
social security outlays. Diabetes and obesity are likely to kill or
disable people in their 50s or 60s, adding to the Social Security
burden.
President Bush repeated some nonsense spread by the right-wing
organizations when he said that black people do not live as long on
average, so they do not collect their fair share of Social Security. The
average from black people is low because many of them die as infants and
teenagers. At birth, White: 77.1, Black 71.1. If black people survive
until age 65, their remaining life is almost as long as white people's.
White: 17.8 years, Black 16.1 years. See Table 12B:

http://www.efmoody.com/estate/lifeexpectancy.html
Overall, black people collect more Social Security than white people
because they tend to retire earlier with disabilities. 
People are often confused by averages, but in this case there is no
confusion. The assertion has been corrected again and again by experts
from the Census Bureau and elsewhere, but the right-wing groups continue
to repeat it. (Bush may be honestly confused, because he appears to be
innumerate.)
Sorry to get off-topic.
- Jed

Re: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power


Keith,

 Here the author implies that the Chernobyl accident was
due to some major fault in the reactor design and
implementation, carefully ignoring the fact that the real
accident, as it occurred in the real world that you and I
live in, was due to technicians shutting off all of the
fail-safe systems and intentionally driving the reactor to
failure.

NO NO NO !!!

Just to clear up one major point and continuation of a line
of disinformation put out by the Soviets. The Chernobyl
reactor design - and not the irresponsible acts of the
employees - caused the accident. You are falling for the
same bogus story put out by the Soviets to protect their
other reactor assets - also flawed from day-one. And make no
mistake, the immediate cause of the accident was worker
stupidity but the accident was absolutely inevitable, given
the flawed design (now changed). We were actually taught
this in the 60s as part of a reactor design course. The US
considered but rejected this design in the 50s (it is a
cheaper design and needs far less enrichment the PWR).

This Soviet design has a fatal flaw in that the coolant
(light water) is NOT the moderator. The moderator - carbon -
has far less thermal neutron cross-section than does the
coolant, so in a loss-of-coolant accident, your reactivity
goes way UP instead of down, and exponentially fast, it
should be added. In all US designed reactors,
loss-of-coolant shuts the reactor down because the coolant
IS also the moderator: HUGE difference.

We even told this the Soviets this back in the 60s in great
detail - yet they persisted with a totally flawed design
because it was cheap, plus they did not educate the workers
well enough about the fatal consequences of loss-of-coolant.
In a US reactor, this loss would shut the reactor down over
time, as it did at TMI but in their flawed design, loss of
coolant exponentially increases the reactivity of the core -
and failure is guaranteed.

This fault goes straight back to the Soviet bureauracracy
and their lack of accountability for anything other than the
lowest-cost solution- and not exactly to the workers
themselves, however stupid their actions were (and they were
*stupid* beyond all comprehension but yet that was not the
ultimate problem).

Jones

Re: Why the US needs more nuclear power

Richard,

How many years can a Nuke plant operate before it becomes
unsafe? The best guess is about 50 years maximum.

++ That is true for the PWR design because of metal fatigue,
as you say, but not necessaruly true of an improved next-gen
reactor design where the structural material is graphite
fiber and the reactor is unpressurized, and steam is not
used/.

The only solution then becomes to encase the whole works
inside a concrete coffin for a minimum of 4000 years.

++ If you imporve the design into numerous (50 or so) small
rail-car sized reactors, intead of one large one, then these
can be encoffined on site, after they reach full maturity
(75 years) and the same plant can continue operating for
many hundreds of years.

We have the South Texas Nuclear plant nearby in Bay City
Texas.. its beginning to age and may not be safe in 10 more
years.
Not to worry,  Cemex of Mexico is the rising star and will
supply the materials for the coffin.

++At least the South Texas Nuclear plant did not release the
seveal hundred tons of uranium which a coal fired plant
releases **directly into the air** over its lifetime!!

While on the subject of electric power generation..
consider the health and fitness clubs running treadmills..
what a waste of energy to work off a few pounds only to get
in you 4 wheel drive super SUV with 10 cylinders and drive
to Chili's for a steak and potatos plus a few margaritas for
a well deserved present for lowering your future medicare
costs.

++ Ha! excellent point ... which also highlights the
difficulty and conflicting choices which we must make... and
soon!

Jones

Re: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power

- Original Message - 
From: Jed Rothwell

 the energy payback time for a wind turbine is the lowest
of any conventional energy source. It takes about 3 months
for a wind tower to produce enough energy to manufacture
another tower.

Excellent. Again... everyone *should* be for using wind
energy in every site where it is feasible. Every consumer
and every utility should be in favor of that.  But even so,
that will not be nearly enough, as a practical matter.

You talk as if there is some kind of conspiracy against
wind. I do not see any conspiracy here. All the power
companies desire to have the lowest cost, most reliable
source of energy - and none that I know of will exclude wind
as a source, so long as it is competitive - why would
they?... there is no conspiracy against wind energy. There
just are not that many sites where there is reliable wind in
proximity to the national grid, as many proponents want us
to believe. The power companies are not against wind, but
there are against investing money where there is no decent
return on investment.

The article in FSB about the South Dakota Indian tribe is a
perfect case in point. They have a great site. They have the
motivation. There are no political obstacles. But they have
no money, and when they go to a power-generator, or to a
bank, the problem is always the same - sure we would invest
here, except the cost to get the power from Dakota to the
grid is then times higher than the cost of the wind-farm...
or whatever.

I think wind will take care of itself, to the degree that
there are good sites available. There is no conspiracy
against wind that I can see and the problem of re-educating
the utility companies was taken care of a decade ago... so
what are you really saying? That there is still some secret
conspiracy out there?

Jones

RE: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power

2005-04-05 Thread Keith Nagel

Jones,

Yes, it is the case that reactors should be designed
with more concern for safety. I understand that. I also
agree that the soviet reactor design was poor, just as you say. Yet the fact
remains that it took human hands to turn off the existing fail safe
equipment, and destructively test the reactor. NO ENGINEERING
DESIGN CAN WITHSTAND THE HUMAN HAND. All machines will
fail in the end, because humans are smarter than machines
and can think of utterly ingenious ways to break them.

The immediate cause of the accident is all I care about, frankly.
Because that's what caused the accident. You seem to think
we can defeat Godels Law and build a machine that is impossible
to break. The rest of the reactors adjacent to the destroyed
reactor have worked fine to this point, because no one
has ( yet ) shut off all the safety overrides and tried
to destructively test the reactor again. But it's a matter
of time...

Here's a more recent example. The last nuclear accident
in Japan occurred when workers processed uranium fuel
rods in a steel mop bucket!!! They put in enough material
to reach critical mass, which caused a small explosion.
Now perhaps Japanese mop buckets can be redesigned with
a special radiation sensors that alerts the user when
he's put too much uranium in the mop bucket for processing.
Or better still, a lid which prevents the insertion of
uranium fuel rods. All these things would help, as
you say about the SU designed reactor. But what caused
the accident? And how will all our careful designs
help solve the problem? Don't you think the workers
would have cut the wires to that annoying alarm they
keep hearing when they load the bucket with uranium?
Or unscrew the lid? What the hell are they doing
processing uranium in a mop bucket!!! At what point do we admit PBKAC,
as we say in the software industry, ( Problem Between Keyboard And Chair ).

I'm all for nuclear power, it's a great source of energy.
The problem is these pesky primates we have to rely on to
run the plants. How do we redesign them for safety?

Jones writes:
This fault goes straight back to the Soviet bureauracracy
and their lack of accountability for anything other than the
lowest-cost solution.

That sounds exactly like what we have here.

K.

-Original Message-
From: Jones Beene [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 12:29 PM
To: vortex
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power



Keith,

 Here the author implies that the Chernobyl accident was
due to some major fault in the reactor design and
implementation, carefully ignoring the fact that the real
accident, as it occurred in the real world that you and I
live in, was due to technicians shutting off all of the
fail-safe systems and intentionally driving the reactor to
failure.

NO NO NO !!!

Just to clear up one major point and continuation of a line
of disinformation put out by the Soviets. The Chernobyl
reactor design - and not the irresponsible acts of the
employees - caused the accident. You are falling for the
same bogus story put out by the Soviets to protect their
other reactor assets - also flawed from day-one. And make no
mistake, the immediate cause of the accident was worker
stupidity but the accident was absolutely inevitable, given
the flawed design (now changed). We were actually taught
this in the 60s as part of a reactor design course. The US
considered but rejected this design in the 50s (it is a
cheaper design and needs far less enrichment the PWR).

This Soviet design has a fatal flaw in that the coolant
(light water) is NOT the moderator. The moderator - carbon -
has far less thermal neutron cross-section than does the
coolant, so in a loss-of-coolant accident, your reactivity
goes way UP instead of down, and exponentially fast, it
should be added. In all US designed reactors,
loss-of-coolant shuts the reactor down because the coolant
IS also the moderator: HUGE difference.

We even told this the Soviets this back in the 60s in great
detail - yet they persisted with a totally flawed design
because it was cheap, plus they did not educate the workers
well enough about the fatal consequences of loss-of-coolant.
In a US reactor, this loss would shut the reactor down over
time, as it did at TMI but in their flawed design, loss of
coolant exponentially increases the reactivity of the core -
and failure is guaranteed.

This fault goes straight back to the Soviet bureauracracy
and their lack of accountability for anything other than the
lowest-cost solution- and not exactly to the workers
themselves, however stupid their actions were (and they were
*stupid* beyond all comprehension but yet that was not the
ultimate problem).

Jones

Re: OFF TOPIC Demography and cigarettes

At 11:58 AM 4/5/5, Jed Rothwell wrote:
[snip]
Bush may be honestly confused, because he appears to be
innumerate.)
[snip]

What an interesting and useful word you have coined there:

innumerate, adj,

  1.  free of numbers,
  2.  numerically challenged,
  3.  unable to quantify or compute,
  4.  unfettered by quantitative reality.

This absolutely must be used in published works.  It deserves to be in the
OED.  8^)

Regards,

Horace Heffner

Re: OFF TOPIC Demography and cigarettes

2005-04-05 Thread Stephen A. Lawrence


Horace Heffner wrote:
At 11:58 AM 4/5/5, Jed Rothwell wrote:
[snip]
 

Bush may be honestly confused, because he appears to be
innumerate.)
   

[snip]
What an interesting and useful word you have coined there:
 

Jed didn't coin it.
Thus says the American Heritage Dictionary:
innumerate
SYLLABICATION: in-nu-mer-ate
ADJECTIVE: Unfamiliar with mathematical concepts and methods.
NOUN: A person who is unfamiliar with mathematical concepts and methods.
OTHER FORMS: in - numer - a - cy (noun)
innumerate, adj,
 1.  free of numbers,
 2.  numerically challenged,
 3.  unable to quantify or compute,
 4.  unfettered by quantitative reality.
This absolutely must be used in published works.  It deserves to be in the
OED.  8^)
Regards,
Horace Heffner

Wind-up flashlight

See:
http://store.yahoo.com/dotcoms/ilwiflet.html
The price has fallen from $40 to $20. These are not very bright. A slightly 
larger version would be ideal for Third World house.

I believe this is the ultimate development of the household flashlight. It 
will never be fundamentally improved in the future. Flashlights 200 years 
from now may be a little brighter, smaller and lighter, and perhaps 
longer-lasting, but they will still be about this big, and they will still 
be hand-powered. When you need a flashlight to walk the dog or put out the 
garbage, you do not want one that is blindingly bright, like an automobile 
headlight. Hand-powered LEDs provide a convenient, useful level of light, 
so I doubt anyone will replace hand power with a battery or a cold fusion 
generator. Cold fusion would be good for a large, powerful flashlight, such 
as one used by rescue workers searching for a child lost in the woods.

Ultimate technology is rare. Most machines can be improved, and will 
evolve. Examples of ultimate technology in daily life include spoons, 
buttons on shirts, and the 4-function solar powered calculator. Of course 
we make more complex calculators for some purposes. But for simple 
arithmetic and the quick estimates we used to do with slide rules, I doubt 
the 4-function calculator can be improved upon. Buttons on a shirt can be 
replaced with a zipper or Velcro, but there is no real advantage.

- Jed

Re: OT: If I were Pope.

2005-04-05 Thread Edmund Storms

Like in science, the conclusion one reaches depends on the assumptions
made at the beginning. The beliefs of each religion and the rules
supposed to be God-given suffer from this same limitation.

In this article the author makes the argument that the rules of the
Catholic Church, i.e. no abortion, no condoms, and no gay marriage,
would not advance mankind because their change would separate the sex
act from its primary intention, thereby causing injury to mankind.

The fact not considered is that all three prohibitions would lead to a
smaller population. The assumption not considered is that this fact
might be a good thing. Providing a growing Catholic population has
always been the self-serving policy of the church. For centuries, this
policy gave an advantage to the human race. However, this advantage is
rapidly decaying away as population grows at a compounding rate. How
many more people must suck the resources out of the earth before the
Church changes its policy? I suggest that even science can not mediate
the damage if population grows at a sufficiently rapid rate.

Ed
Grimer wrote:
I thought this was a rather intelligent article which some
Vorts might appreciate, i.e. those that believe that objective
truth is not merely confined to science.;-)
Why progressive Westerners never understood John Paul II
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 05/04/2005)
If I were Pope - and no, don't worry, I'm not planning a mid-life career change - but, if I were,
I'd be a little irked at the secular media's inability to discuss religion except through the prism
of their moral relativism. That's why last weekend's grand old man - James Callaghan - got a more
sympathetic send-off than this weekend's. The Guardian's headline writer billed Sunny Jim as a man
whose consensus politics were washed away in the late 1970s. Is it possible to have any
meaningful consensus between, on the one hand, closed-shop council manual workers
demanding a 40 per cent pay rise and, on the other, rational human beings? What would the middle
ground between the real world and Planet Zongo look like? A 30 per cent pay rise, rising to 40 per
cent over 18 months or the next strike, whichever comes sooner?

By contrast, the Guardian thought Karol Wojtyla was a doctrinaire, authoritarian pontiff. That
doctrinaire at least suggests the inflexible authoritarian derived his inflexibility from some ancient
operating manual - he was dogmatic about his dogma - unlike the New York Times and the Washington Post, which came
close to implying that John Paul II had taken against abortion and gay marriage off the top of his head, principally to
irk liberal Catholics. The assumption is always that there's some middle ground that a less
doctrinaire pope might have staked out: he might have supported abortion in the first trimester, say, or
reciprocal partner benefits for gays in committed relationships.
The root of the Pope's thinking - that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to - is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in play, and by consensus all we're really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it'll be something else - it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block?

We live in a present-tense culture where novelty is its own virtue: the Guardian, for
example, has already been touting the Nigerian Francis Arinze as candidate for
first black pope. This would be news to Pope St Victor, an African and pontiff from
189 to 199. Among his legacies: the celebration of Easter on a Sunday.
That's not what the Guardian had in mind, of course: it meant the first black pope since the
death of Elvis - or however far back our societal memory now goes. But, if you hold an office
first held by St Peter, you can say been there, done that about pretty much everything
the Guardian throws your way. John Paul's papacy was founded on what he called - in the title of
his encyclical - Veritatis Splendor, and when you seek to find consensus between truth and lies you
tarnish that splendour.
Der Spiegel this week published a selection from the creepy suck-up letters Gerhard
Schröder wrote to the East German totalitarian leaders when he was a West German pol on
the make in the 1980s. As he wrote to Honecker's deputy, Egon Krenz: I will
certainly need the endurance you have wished me in this busy election year. But you will
certainly also need great strength and good health for your People's Chamber
election. The only difference being that, on one side of the border, the election
result was not in doubt.
When a free man enjoying the blessings of a free society promotes an
equivalence between real democracy and a sham, he's colluding in the great lie
being perpetrated by the prison state. Too many Western politicians of a

Re: Why the U.S. Needs More Nuclear Power

At 2:02 PM 4/5/5, Jed Rothwell wrote:

There is not enough wind for electricity because of the problems you
enumerated about the grid, and distances.

Cost of long range power transmission is an important issue, and one which
vortex should examine more carefully.  At this time I have only time for
babbling, so maybe someone will carry the ball here.  There are a number of
good web sites on this.  I do know that DC transmission lines over 1200
miles in range are presently profitable compared to AC transmission, and I
think long range DC power transmission lines exist on the US west coast
already.  The recent drops in power silicon circuit cost has made DC power
transmission economically feasible.  It is EM radiation emission free, and
does not require ugly and dangerous transmission lines and towers.  It is
also apparently even more relible, based on experience obtained with an
underwater transmission system in Europe.

If room temperature superconduction (RTSC) is developed then power
transmission will take on a whole new nature.  One or more vorts is working
in the RTSC area already (still there Mark?)

Regards,

Horace Heffner

Re: vortex-digest Digest V2005 #161

2005-04-05 Thread John Robertson

I have been a lurker for years now and have enjoyed the discussions 
very much. I am an innumerate linguist, unprepared to comment on much 
of the technical details of these discussions. I would, however, like 
to emerge from my years of lurking to comment (of topic) on Jed's 
statement:

snip
Throughout history, capitalists have sacrificed millions of lives and 
their own futures time after time with stupid, self-destructive 
behavior. This is human nature. Capitalism is the most efficient way to 
allocate money and resources, but it does not promote morality or human 
decency any more than communism does. It is an amoral economic system. 
Engineering is the most efficient way to build machinery, and it is 
equally amoral. It works just as well whether you build lifesaving 
machinery or instruments to torture people with.
and snip

The question of morality is an interesting one. English has three 
terms: moral, immoral, amoral. Taken by themselves the words have a 
positive, negative and neutral connotation. The referents to which the 
words might attach, however, are another issue. What was immoral for 
Stalin's Communism, might have been fine and dandy for Roosevelt's 
democracy, and vice versa. The real question is if there is a basis for 
determining morality independent of Stalin's communist culture or 
Roosevelt's capitalist culture. There seems to be an overwhelming if 
not universal sense, for example, that incest is neither moral, nor 
amoral -- Egyptian and Incan  practice of marriage (kings and queens) 
not withstanding. In general, we humans have a hard time believing that 
wanton murder for selfish and personal gain is acceptable behavior. 
These may well be examples of behavior that the majority of the human 
race might describe using immoral (whatever the term for 
unacceptable behavior).

However, since there is so much gray area in determining behavior that 
is moral, immoral, or amoral, I have to believe that it is impossible 
to persuade anyone with fixed beliefs to change. Therefore, I doubt 
that this will persuade Jed: (a) It is harder to dismiss communism as 
an economic system from communism an ideo-political system than it is 
to separate capitalism as an economic system from capitalism as a 
political system. It is fair to say, I  believe, that capitalism, past 
and present, encompasses more diversity of political systems than 
communism ever did. (b) If we are to believe the The Black Book of 
Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression  (by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas 
Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek ...), the 
behavior engendered by Communism in the 20th Century was directly and 
indirectly responsible for the deaths of from 80 to 100 million people. 
I find such wanton, selfish killing immoral. I may be wrong, but I do 
not believe that as many people who suffered in Jed's thrall of 
capitalism in the same century were killed for the same wanton, selfish 
reasons. One might argue that the flourishing of technology helped more 
people under capitalism than it did under Communism.

It is probably fair to say that what we believe is what we are willing 
to act on. What we choose to believe really does matter to our future 
and more importantly, to the future of others as well. The data seem to 
argue that communism -- a belief system that prompted wanton, selfish 
destruction of human beings -- is hardly amoral.

Re: Re: OFF TOPIC Demography and cigarettes

2005-04-05 Thread orionworks

 From: Horace Heffner

...

 Yep, by golly.  For a few years in the 70's I travelled
 cost to cost installing systems software in big computer
 systems.  Some systems consumed more than the area of a
 football field in raised floor.  In those olden
 days I recall having to work out the total system power
 and air conditioning Btu requirements before ordering any
 device, including a disk controller, which was a device
 about twice the size of a refrigerator.  Now
 disk controllers are a mere chip.  Some day disk drives
 will go the way of punched cards.
 
 Regards,
 
 Horace Heffner  
 

Speaking of legendary computer (and punched card) stories the one I'll never 
forget occurred when an older programmer showed me a trick of the trade. Back 
around 1979 I was compiling another object code deck (IBM cards) from an 
assembler language program on an IBM 360-20 with 32K of memory, 30 megabyte 
hard drive. I miss-keyed one of the address locations, creating a syntax 
error. I was bummed because I knew it would take another 30 minutes for the 
computer to punch out another deck of object code, just to correct the one 
miss-keyed address location. FEAR NOT said the older programmer. Since we knew 
what the actual hexadecimal address was (by looking at the cross reference 
listing) he took me over to the keypunch machine and punched out a new object 
card containing the correct hexadecimal address. He then took me over to the 
object deck and unceremoniously replaced the erroneous card. Time spent fixing 
my syntax error: 5 minutes.

He could have performed the trick even more quickly but he was teaching me.

The older programmer has since made his transition to the next dimension, but 
I'll never forget the delight he gave me in this simple lesson: Human speed can 
on occasion be faster than what a computer can do.

Regards

Steven Vincent Johnson
www.OrionWorks.com

Re: OT: If I were Pope.



Grimer wrote:
But the most effective weapon
against the disease has not been the Aids lobby's 20-year promotion of
condom culture in Africa, but Uganda's campaign to change behaviour and
to emphasise abstinence and fidelity - i.e., the Pope's
position.
I know nothing about religion, but I know plenty about AIDS, population,
effective disease prevention strategies and so on, and this is incorrect.
I agree that education and promoting responsible sexual behavior have an
important role to play, but policies that do not make effective use of
condoms will condemn millions of people to gruesome death for no reason,
and leave millions of orphans who will starve. Most of the women with
AIDS in Africa are faithful to their husbands, but husbands in Africa
have *never* in faithful to wives. They never have been in recorded
history, and they will not start now.
Whatever good the Pope may have done, it was outweighed by his opposition
to contraception and the use of condoms.
Overpopulation is the worst crisis of the 21st century. Because the world
is overpopulated (or to put it another way, because our food-production
technology is so destructive and inefficient), the world's resources and
land are being ravaged and two billion people live on the edge of
starvation, in unthinkable misery. *THAT* is a morality problem. What
people do with their sex organs is mostly their own business. (The only
sexual behavior that bothers me is pedophilia, and the only major
organization guilty of countenancing it on a large scale is the Catholic
Church, as it happens. The Pope looked the other way for a long
time.)
If cold fusion can be perfected and agriculture eliminated then the world
will support a higher human population without damage to the ecosystem.
In that case, contraception will be a little less important for a few
decades. But in the long term it is essential. We cannot sustain
exponential growth.
Population will never come under control until effective contraception,
education for women, child care and old-age pensions are put in place.
Mumbo-jumbo about changing behavior will accomplish nothing. People never
behaved differently than they do now. I have never heard of a society in
which most teenagers were abstinent. In the US teenage pregnancy rates
have been unchanged since colonial times. The only reason pregnancy is
declining now is because of the increased availability of
contraception.
I do not go along with this idea that Grimer and Pope endorse, that we
should go around lecturing Africans about their sex lives. People can
decide for themselves how they should behave, and what they consider
moral. They need no help from us. They do not want lessons in morality
from us. If they feel like engaging in depersonalized sexual games, the
way ancient Romans, Japanese and Chinese people did, that is entirely
their call, and their business. As mayor La Guardia said of the Pope:
you no play-a the game, you no make-a the rules.

I know nothing about religion. It seems synonymous with superstition, as
far as I can make out. The Pope claimed that the assassination attempt
against him was prevented by a dead person, St. Mary, who deflected the
gun. I expect he believed that a virgin conceived and bore a child.
People who believe in ghosts, biological impossibilities and similar
weird notions live in a different world than I do. They are as distant
from me as the primitive tribes in South Pacific islands or pre-modern
Japanese peasants. I have studied the Islanders and the Japanese. I know
a lot about them. I sympathize with them. I admire them, and their
culture, arts, and languages. I like their sexual morality, which the
Pope would not approve of. But despite my wholehearted admiration and
knowledge of them, there is an unbridgeable 400-year gap between us,
starting with Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton. The Pope stands on the
other side of that gap, mired in pre-modern, pre-scientific
darkness.
Despite all the pleasant rhetoric and high-minded people who claim there
is no conflict between science and religion, it seems clear to me that
there is. It is no coincidence that most scientists are atheists
(according to the Scientific American and other sources). T. H. Huxley
was the first scientist to openly champion science against religion.
Everything he said seems correct and up-to-date to me. Religion offers
certainty without proof, just the opposite of science. It asks people to
believe in fabulous nonsense such as a virgin birth, Noah's Ark, bringing
people back from the dead, curing diseases by hocus-pocus and
faith-healing (which is to say, blaming the patient for the disease), or
changing primate sexual behavior such as homosexuality. I cannot imagine
how a sane, educated, modern person could believe such things, but some
people do, including many of my friends. Perhaps I lack imagination. I am
glad I do! Frankly, I cannot see why anyone would even *want* to believe
in these things. They are nightmares, even as myths.

Re: OT: If I were Pope.



Edmund Storms wrote:
How many more people must suck
the resources out of the earth before the Church changes its policy? I
suggest that even science can not mediate the damage if population grows
at a sufficiently rapid rate.
Some of the ecological damage from overpopulation is permanent. However,
results from many different societies have shown that science together
with enlightened social policy can reduce or even reverse population
growth. This can happen remarkably swiftly, sometimes in a single
generation. It is much cheaper it used to be. In the 1960s some experts
worried that we would not have enough money to distribute contraception.
Others worried that traditional societies would resist the changes, or
that village health care providers and women would not be skilled enough
to use it. Of course money is a problem, now mainly because the present
US administration refuses to provide it and wants to lecture people about
abortion and morality instead. There is resistance in some societies,
especially those mired in war such as Afghanistan. But there is less
resistance than many people expected. And it turns out Third World women
can take care of themselves as well as First World women can. (A
no-brainer.)
Contraception is essential, obviously, but not sufficient. As I said
before, three other reforms are needed: education and freedom for women;
improved health care for everyone, especially children; and old age
pensions. The latter two are essential because in many societies children
are the only security parents have in their old age. People who have no
children starve. Where there is no healthcare parents must have 7 or 8
children to ensure that one or two will survive.
As for education, it turns that women everywhere want education, money
empowerment and freedom. (Another no-brainer!) Low-cost Internet
connections in remote Indian villages and elsewhere are bringing it to
them in ways that would have been unimaginable 30 years ago.
The remaining problems are political, not scientific. The biggest
roadblocks, as far as I can see, are the Catholic and Muslim religions.
If they disappeared overnight I think it would be a big improvement. In
Europe, especially Italy, people ignore the sex morality of the Catholic
church. Let us hope they soon learn to ignore it in Peru and Brazil as
well. I am confident that they can and they will. People are much smarter
than we give them credit for.
Improvements in contraception were among the most important scientific
discoveries of the 20th century -- or indeed, of any century. They are
right up there with electricity, vaccination, anesthetics, and flight.
Most of the hard work was done in America, and we should take great pride
in this. I wish this history was taught in schools, but I suppose
students nowadays hardly learn about Pasteur or Edison. Much of the
research was conducted under the guidance and inspiration of Margaret
Sanger, with funds she scrounged together. Sanger was one of America's
greatest scientific heroes. I am inordinately proud of the fact that my
grandmother pitched in to help her financially and in other ways. It was
only a bit role in history, but look at the result! If cold fusion
succeeds I will have played a similar small but essential role. Sanger,
needless to say, fought a pitched battle with religion, just as Huxley
did. Humanitarians such as Sanger have brought a million times more
happiness, well-being, and solid, reality-based self-knowledge to people
than the Pope and all those other mystical mumblers tied together.
Nowadays many liberal religious people honor Sanger but they were no help
back then when she needed them. She had to fight them every step of the
way, just as CF researchers have to fight the DoE.
- Jed

Re: Coaxial Capacitor Thrustor