Month: August 2023

Our mind has a task, which is to keep us alive and not make mistakes that might kill us. This task is made difficult because of changing circumstances and our changing health and needs for food, shelter, intimacy, excitement. The society most of us (that read this anyhow) live in however is based on a model where needs are expected to be met by someone as long as there is profit in it. This means other people will start to mess with your life as soon as you express a need, or show behavior you have a need. Also before you have a need, some may want to induce a need in you (advertisement) or profit soley off your looking for a solution for your need (spiritual searchers), and of course some will try to help you while knowing there is no solution to your need (mid life crisis behavior).

In this reality, where we are basically fish in a bowl, where we give off many signals about our mental and physical state all the time, we are very likely to get stuck in some kind of exploitation trajectory or another. So as soon as you search ‘Guitar solo Pink Floyd’ you fall into a category ready to expend money on a whole lot of stuff you don’t need related to guitars, Pink Floyd etc. Pop culture was really monoculture, only limited in complexity to what radio and TV at the time could promote. You can be an outlier and like Bad Brains or Frank Zappa, but then again you are quite easy to characterize.

The more you show yourself the easier it is to be characterized and economically targeted

To be correct we should perhaps investigate the need to be unique for a moment. Why do we feel this need? It is one of the basic needs of a child, to develop into a sane person a child must have some sense of individuality. There are three other factors, won’t go into them here, but of course how can you even identify yourself if you have no unique trait? But on the other hand, why would you want to be unique? I guess I have to continue this line of questioning some other time.

This post is about getting stuck. The short of it is that the economy and profit seeking people want you to get stuck. Stuck in front of your TV preferably, so you can be programmed to take initiative in aquiring goods and services that the economy offers. Stuck online so you can also be enticed by advertisements to move and behave in certain ways you may or may not enjoy (nobody cares really, its all about profits).

On top of that your mind wants to get stuck, it is looking for habits that do not need to change, that satisfy you. I always think of the mind as a gardener, and your essence being a tiny plant that needs to be tended to by the mind. The mind runs around and thinks this and that, and what it thinks doesn’t matter at all as long as the plant is happy.This is why there are so many ways to live happy lives, even as a murderous tyrant you can be pretty happy. Its all good as long as the basic needs are met.

The problem with getting stuck really is the economy, the banks that force us all to seek profit and income. That has to come from someone else, and so we basically work to take money from each other all the time. The people that are stuck are easiest to get money from, and then I mean stuck in a way that is not super profitable. Incidently it is true, people can get stuck in a profitable life. But you can’t really call that stuck. Their minds can also close down all sources of change. Still they will get assurances and confirmation that they should be happy, which doesn’t happen to people getting stuck in lives that suck.

But again the problem is that if you get stuck in our modern economy you are destined to lose all your money and hence all your options to ever get unstuck. It is like quicksand or losing your mobility, and you are aging as well. The economy is waiting for you to become more needy and has an army of solutions for you that may or may not help you live a happy life stuck where you are (getting unstuck is not profitable!). You are a sitting duck being stuck in a life that may suck.

So how to get unstuck. What if you are on a raft in a river that will ultimately dump you into the ocean to become fish food. Going with the flow is a mantra that was designed to tell you ‘get stuck’. If getting stuck is so inevitale, when is it finally ok to get stuck? We all get stuck in the end anyhow, in a coffin or urn. First the question of uniqueness should be addressed, why should we really be unique? I would say we should be ouselves, not have someone define us.

The problem with people defining us is that its a form of bullying that makes many of us conform to the definition. allowing someone to define you is already a submissive interaction. ‘You’re my son’ is fine, but ‘You’re a communist’ is not. ‘Your a tapehead’ is not. There is a subtle difference between you wanting to identify with a group because its fun and it increases social coherence and someone else wanting to define you in order to decide how to get to your money or how to exclude you from resources (the inverse strategy of profit seeking).

Best strategy : Don’t define yourself. Don’t give others a means to simplify you. Be your name to them. Of course you can’t prevent others to define you, and there’s a seemingly artificial trend of making ‘self identification’ an issue to argue about. That is not going to get you unstuck.

Once you are over what you are, you can start to dream on your own, what do you love? What world do you want to see? What if there was nobody else (besides people you want to exist) what would you strive for. We forget that to achieve a goal requires to have a goal. Also research found that distracting oneself from thinking about one’s goals is the main reason they are not achieved.

Our economy wants to put you into a consumer segment and works really hard to get you into one of the funnels. ‘audiophile’ ‘gear head’ ‘trekkie’ ‘watch collector’. There are distractions everywhere, all the time, they intrude into your life to take hold of your thoughts and insult your soul into submission. “You don’t have a life until you are on this ski slope!” “You don’t have a life until you are dining with this lady!”. Well only if you have not worked hard enough to satisfy your soul yourself. That is what this is all about. About serving and freeing your soul.

A simple rule may help : If your behavior does not allow you to change your behavior you will become more stuck. If your behavior allows you to change your behavior you will become less stuck.

So if you are sedentary and lazy, you will become more stuck, because you will find physically moving around increasingly arduous and will not do it.

If you don’t read about other thoughts than yours you will get stuck and you will not have the thoughts needed to get unstuck or change your behavior. Your soul will be waiting for something to happen but you won’t understand it or listen to it, because it doesn’t have the words to tell you want it wants. Express your goals.

If you don’t explore you will miss out on changes that may help you become happier, you may live in an artificial bubble with repetitive events you have become accustomed to, like there are so many bubbles in media land, the people that sit watching presenters talk about whatever happens in a very posh voice. You parrot what is said to not draw attention and present a posh image too and then go on being stuck.

Some people just want to be reassured they have a decent life

If you want to get unstuck you have to somehow grab the banks of the river you are floating along. Something that is real and harsh and not in your bubble. A real other person or a real event you become part of. I don’t mean the bubble events designed to reinforce your bubble existence. If you are leftist go to a right wing gathering, if you are right wing you probably aren’t reading this. Go see things for yourself. Or apply your skills in new situations. Of course its natural and valid to strive for your personal goals. Then the purpose of getting unstuck is to once again make steps on the road to achieve them. Consider who you want to bring along, what you need to bring along. Stuff can get you seriously stuck. But maybe you find some item very inspiring if it reminds you of your goals.

It is good to find others that want to get unstuck, that have a similar dream or ambition and to be ware of profit seekers who really don’t have your interest at heart. Make priority lists, short ones, so you get unstuck from habits that really don’t move you forward. A rule “don’t sit still” or “require real world effects from time spend” filters out a lot of time wasted. Using the SMART criteria ( specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) are a tried and tested way to become more effective and efficient, just don’t use it to become the perfect econobot.

Being unhappy about your situation is not a good way to get unstuck. This is why we are presented with so many problems. They are a way to keep us in our seat and demotivated. It is hard for your mind to know what is you and what is the outside world. Because of this criminals can get away with murder as long as the can make you believe ‘we’ did it or it is ‘our’ problem. Be precise about what you are responsible for.

Blaming things for your fate is not thinking about how to improve it. Don’t.

Our mind really wants to accept responsibility for everything that happens (like children that always feel responsible for the arguments of their parents). Again, the key to achieving a goal is to think about it, to focus on it. You can’t focus on any personal goal if you are dealing with whatever happens or what you think sucks about your life. So make thinking about your goals something you want to do. This may require some mood improvement, because you may be reminded of things you have zero interest in by a feeling you seem to be stuck with. This is the biggest illusion, because you choose how you feel about things, not your body. If your feeling is terrible, simply do whatever you think is right for you anyway, even with a horrible feeling in your stomach. There is no resistance to your actions if it is only your mind that has to decide to take them, although it might seem like you are about to move a mountain. Your body and mind can create that illusion that keep you lazy on the couch while your life and dreams slip away. Don’t expect miracles, but be confident if you are doing even a simple thing that means you are no longer stuck that it is doable and you can do it.

I hope this helps.

All around the world people stuck in cities and livestyles are trying their hardest to ignore climate change. It gets hotter and hotter, things start to burn, the beach is unbearably hot. Wet bulb temperatures show being outside has become lethal and field workers die from heat exhaustion every day, the economy has to move forward, cashflow has to be maximized, banks have to be served (and customers of course whatever)

But if the choice is sweltering heat, possible heat death, no future and no improvement or concerted action (like increasing albedo!). If the only option is to stay on the plane as it barrels towards the ground, because the sales of the in flight snacks is making the stewardesses rich, this is a macabre and fatalistic fate. It is really because so few actually pay attention that they are not scared, angry or done with all the problems they face in life and simply quit. In short order in society is fragile and gets more fagile as we see more evidence of unaviodable suffering.

At some point the return on creating a perspective, that is a real one, not the greenwashing ‘if you separate your trash you’ll be fine’ type of perspective, will become positive. The economy in its cruel persistence can not continue to strangle the life out of our planet if we become aware of our impending doom, our actual fate, and how little we will get from those same institutions that now claim they are the cornerstones of civilization. It is all a bunch of lies.

The best informed, richest and most mercilessly destructive institutes, our Wall Street banks, our financers of clearcutting, eradicating, polluting and depleting, will have to define their path to some semblance of normalcy, no matter how it is achieved. If they don’t people will drop everything. Even if the world economy is crashed to lock people into their homes and a new virus is released (on top of the other suffering) people will simply start doing whatever the fuck they want.

Governments that now still hop and jump like Przewalski horses for the promise of a nice life and cushy future will lose fate in it, and the magic will stop working. Better a government that gets wise now, that wakes up now, of people that do not buy the nonsense, that can think standing on their own two feet that people dropping dead from the heat is not part of that ‘shining city upon the hill’, we must leave OZ and look behind the curtain, not be infantile but mature and willing to survive, to dare to want to survive, it sounds idiotic. Soon even the most horrible contributers to the climate calamity has to come up with a plan, a path, or people will walk away.

A few years back the prognosis of our planet was dire, but we where all in this together. Eventually fossil would be gone, and renewables would take over, we would have more local autonomy, and this would break up the bank dominance and economism for good. This still holds, we are in the last few decades of bank domination. They hoard land, city space, lock people into jobs they don’t like, lock people out of access to resources that could be used, all to maximize their power.

But since AI and LLM entered the scene, and with the prospect of rapid advances in stacked circuits on silicon, permanent RAM memory, possible use of memristors and exploding production of GPU compute. It seems a real risk people who are mostly in the economistic matrix (so not the poor ones in third world countries, not North Koreans, not anyone without a bank account or education or job), will soon be fully captured. Fully known and programmed by their social media consumption or overinformed friends and relatives.

"This dystopian outrage that is now all over China… I once again cannot buy food"

Do the Chinese fear that the "CCP" will cut off their digital payments?

No

Let’s find out if this TikToker is a fraud, in this 🧵

1/5 pic.twitter.com/s0Q5pbs7Y2

— Keawe Wong 凯王 (@KeaweWong) August 20, 2023

This means those people will be doing the economistic, anti climate bidding, but only as long as this is profitable for the relevant financial institutes, the people sponsoring the fossil fuel consumption you effect. They don’t want you to be energetically independent, like a real econobot you are to run for the right to destroy your planet, or you and your family will be degraded, you will lose your buddies. Most well off people are literally crawling into the dirt to show themselves to be fully on board with humanity destroying policies, its disgusting.

Now as a financial elite, who tries to keep the system clean from anyone that may want to remove it or replace it (against reality already, of course domination is not global or ubiquitous), there is no real care for any individual. That is the horror of poeple identifying with a system. Your individual life is not important, because the system has sensitivities that can only be addressed if we cut corners every now and then. Its an open debate what is more deadly, total anarchy or total fossil/banking order, oh wait, there is not, its total fossil/banking order that is boiling us alive today.

With the prosprect of androids and factores run by androids that make androids, and with those androids being fully capable of conversing with us and being directed by us or each other, we enter a new phase where the loss of human life, of human talent, can be seen als less than a tragedy by many. What does it matter if the guy keeping the garden is a robot, if I was driven to my villa by a robot, if the underground farm is run by a robot. Why do I need to use those super vulnerable needy and troublesome people to do that? We are seeing the horse to car, human to android transition and you are either organizing it or going to be a victim of it.

The above is a result of assuming the system protects itself, it has as its key driver two things : A predictable lifestyle for those that comply, and a social sphere where you can mature and be a decent yet of course deeply arrogant and near psychopathic male. To enter the fossil death cult is very fascist, it reeks of a logical purity and simplicity of model that matches the appeal of a racial superiority theory. You get nice offices, suits, cars, houses, nice people (fake expats) lots of opportunity to date women, a superior role in every enviroment, best hotels, good mortgage, pension, etc. But you have to sell as much oil as you can or make banks as important as humanly possible.

Why make people serve the elite if robots can do it?

You can really only beat that system with a competing system all run independently of both money and fossil energy with the same attractiveness and predictability. We need to create that ASAP. But as we have to try to get that done the fossil/banking system hopes to read your mind and program your behavior (through adds) and you may actually be trying hard to comply and perform as well, and of course will not reward those that do not want to help it. This ability I fear will move quicker than the one that provides the less destructive alternative.

It is really important to be aware of the alternative to banks and fossil, namely your own currencies and renewables. There are no massive renewable energy plants that emit their own currency yet, but they will exist. Why would energy generated where you live be traded away to remote places, and not be distributed to you (in the form of tokens) that people that need energy can buy? It is such a weird thing that say all the people that make Rotterdam work have no ownership of almost anything in the city besides their appartment, car, bike, fridge or for the lucky ones a debt on their house.

If humans do not want to be optimized away by a fossil/banking elite that gradually impoverishes everyone while making them comply so they can’t revolt, they need to get on owning whatever they really need as soon as possible. We can not allow debt to inhibit the use of land or buildings or roof space. This is not anarchy but more or less applying the oldest laws of civilization. Even in the first law books it was said that if a man did not work his land, but another man did (it was mostly men back then), after a while the second man owned the land. There wasn’t even talk of prohibiting the second man from working the land!

The clock is ticking. Compliance androids will be banging on your door soon. You will be asked to step outside and hail the neigborhood compliance bot that parades through your street, and he will look awesome augmented by your AR goggles (which you are required to wear outside, incided Ring keeps an eye on you).

To Part Une (part one)

En route to Rome I noticed a big vulcanic crater on the map, it looked interesting. The Lago di Bracciano has lush green banks, the air is clean and was humid. It has both a tropical and otherworldly feel. Like on the banks of Lago di Como (in some places) you can see the world as if modernity hasn’t happened yet.

I contemplated cycling around it, but a runner that left the spot I parked at to walk a bit came back and my phone was empty. You can though run or cycle around it.

The above was part of the ‘before Rome’ places I checked out, then Rome and then the below. Because I wanted to get to Napels I kinda moved on, stopping on the coast at Terracina, which wasn’t that special. The next location had been on my list for a while, a tourist attraction as its supposed to be the italian equivalent of Versailles : Caserta. The city itself is

Caserta

I think throughout the ages people have been impressed by big architecture, and it has been used to subdue people by subconsciously suggestig there are giants around. Caserta’s stairs and arches are the same, you feel like an ant crawling around the grounds..

As tourist traps go this one is nice, you are out in the open, the air is clean, there’s things to see. The staired ponds have fish in them..

Napels

The driving had become pretty routineous, Napels was the part I never reached before (except by rail). Due to the break-in in Turin I wasn’t eager to be in the city itself, so I drove up the vulcano. There I discovered you need a ticket and book well ahead (a month preferably) or no access.

As you can see on the picture above there is a row of telephone poles that go right to the valley. I found it pretty comical, if not anachronistic (but you can love that). Imagine Vesuvius erupts, the carabinieri on watch nervously phones Napels “Sta scoppiando! (It is erupting!)” the reply is pretty dry “Yes, we can see that!”.

I found a pretty good parking spot with a nice view of the vulcano as well as the coast/Napels. I tried to avoid the city, but was interested in the mud baths. I drove down to a part of Napels called Baia, where you find Therme di Baia. There I discovered my bathing clothes where also robbed, and I dithered around. I decided to just enjoy the day on the beach there. I checked out Lago Miseno, a tiny lake with a narrow road by it. I am fascinated by all the vulcanic geology around Italy.

At this point I was done with all the narrow and steep roads and navigating with a big EV camper so I decided to just drive to the place everyone wants to visit, the Amalfi coast, Positano..

Positano

The road to Positano is nice in the way it reveals an almost unreal coastline, with impossible steep rocky slopes and a clear sea below. The coastal road is of course winding and bussy with motorcycles busses and cars. I did manage to find a spot to park and spend the night.

The actual town Positano has a beach you can descend towards via stairs through a maze of shops and restaurants. In front of the coast people with big yachts and tenders do their exclusive dance

I guess the trick to these places is to arrange your transportation so it is seamless, then arrange your hotel so you are not close to a main road nor somewhere up in the mountains. Then you can go and enjoy it and enjoy the experience without hassle. Don’t dine at roadside restaurants..

I had to look up and down for a place to park and in the end found one on the road. Didn’t get fined, everyone parks anywhere there. Next morning a modest breakfast. Had I know the final cost I could not have been more frugal.

To not push my luck and because it was so bussy I did not stay near Positano, moved on further South. I was for some reason pretty exhausted maybe because of the heat or the driving..

On the way I tried a charging station as shown above. It did not work properly. The owner of the gas station was yelling at me to stop trying and eventually ripped the cable from my hand. There was nothing to gain from protesting or going against it it seemed, he was probably right, but I like to find things out myself. I added a comment on my Chargemap app.

I decided to check out the Great Arch Cave (Grotta del Saraceno) next, and managed to find a parking next to the path leading to it (you could not see it form the beach), but I was too tired.

Out of Gas!

The next day the thing happened that was not supposed to happen ; I ran out of juice. Two factors played a role, first there where not a lot of DC charging locations near Diamante (where I was) and many AC locations did not exist. Second the AC charging mechanism of the Peugeot E-Expert had stopped working when it shut down in Porta Santo Stefano, and either the fuse was blown or something more serious was wrong. So as I was looking for a place to charge and found they where either occupied or didn’t exist, I ended up with zero km reserve..

Lesson learned : Only go to charging locations if there is a picture on Chargemap

I spend a night at a destination charging location, then a day trying to get the thing to charge but it just did not work. Contacting the lease company again they suggested to move the van to Diamante again (where you see the Senec car charging above) but by then I understood AC charging was just not working on the camper.

I had to find a DC charging spot. The one closest to my route was in Corso, so that was where I asked the guy to drive me. He wasn’t happy about it at all, “Too far, to difficult” because the road goes up into the hills. But in the end he agreed and when we where driving he was very happy to see all the green forests. We did blow a tire on the way guess the camper is unusually heavy because its electric.

I don’t know what part of this I payed for in the end, that is another story. The DC charger worked and I knew I just needed to find a route with plenty of them, and charge early from now on. The problem was not so much stress but I was a bit disappointed in the inability of anyone to solve the charging problem. It meant I could not travel the route I planned because Albania and Montenegro

To be continued..

Craco Matera Gravina

Unward and upwards!

Monte Sant’Angelo

San Nicola Varano

Norcia

Assisi

Arezzo

Florence

Iseo

Canonica d’Adda

Milan

Pavia

Como

Colmar

Sursee

Houffalize

We live in a world where fossil and banks fight for their dominance and have all the guns. You can easily identify people that they control by their debt load and finacial dependency. You can identify their stooges by their position regarding climate and renewable energy. A good fossil stooge prime minister or president will have two tests : 1. Is it good for banks, 2. Is it good for fossil. If either of them are no, whatever the proposal is won’t be supported.

We also live in a world now where big corporations can buy massive compute to run large language models (LLMs) and analyse any type of public communication you may want to put out there, tweets (x messages), facebook chat, updates, wechat, tiktok, youtube. It can all be read, listened to and analysed, no longer on keywords but on meaning. What are you actually talking about, what is your probable intent. It is only a matter of time until machines grade your compliance with the banking/fossil virtual reality (badly broken into by climate reality), or this is already the case.

Twitter or X as it is called now, may prove to be a powerfull tool in this mental surveillance. Academics that tweet will have to tow the pro fossil H2 agenda, will have to promote a ‘no way out’ world view because banks don’t want to allocate credit to activities that reduce their importance (renewable energy). The rudder of mass communications, the social media sphere is jerked hard by the fossil/banking interest, who are the only ones with the funds and the motivation.

And even @X is not non-profit anymore. It has also become an attention market. People that engage users are rewarded, just like on Youtube and other platforms. It runs counter to the original intent of Twitter, which is to just listen to tweets of others. LLMs are reading your tweets now, categorizing you from a compliant consumer to a dangerous terrorist according to what you share. This sounds reasonable to be doing, if its governments that want to stay secure, but it is private companies who can do this, to further their private interests.

You are also the guinee pig, if you are active on social media you can be observed, your response to algorithm changes can be measured, they can be tuned. With AI phrases can be inserted in video’s you watch in the voice of the speaker, so the more you expose yourself to this virtual world the more you can be controlled. The default control is to draw you in to consume more content, but it can be to make you buy stuff, to make you behave in certain ways. For sure the payed paranoid in every countrie’s security institutes, as well as those who serve corporations commercially, are exploring the boundaries of analyis and survailance.

I can say this has always been the case. Since telegraphy was a thing the NSA intercepted all communications, its not a secret. I had an uncle in the 80s that used the most modern computer (with a color monitor!) to datamine from databases that just came online. The owl, the guy that funded Trumps campaign (Mercer) got rich with his speech analysis models, not for nothing. Intelligence is valuable to all of us, because we all compete for money (which is dumb). @X is providing an excellent source of data, as it touts to be for free speech, when it comes to rancunous companies it is about free exposure.

And this doesn’t mean a SWAT team barges into your appertment or anything, it means things may just be harder for people deemed persona no grata. People like me maybe? What happens to all the left wing idealists, I see only economically compliant people in politics. This has been going on since people wanted it to happen, and that has been since the dawn of the fossil/banking alliance.

So really you should consider any social media channel as strictly politicaly correct territory. This in turn makes you part of the indoctrination team and free thought won’t be able to be shared, you won’t find the other minds with more sense of reality than the hyper consumer (eventually) and thus the medium will go stale and petrify, just like Chinese society under Xi’s more obvious surveillance. Just saying.

How to deal with this? Encrypted messages help. But @X has the ambition to become systemic, meaning part of the current fossil/banking system. If it does not comply we are in for some fireworks.

Of course Elon Musk and @X can also decide to become guardian of privacy, but then they have to extract themselves out of a lot of existing dependencies. This may be possible if @X can run from the SpaceX Starlink constellation talking to mobile phones directly. Until then, keep in mind your mind, person and intent is analysed from every word you share with the world.

We need to get real about climate change, it is making parts of the world uninhabitable as we speak. Iran shows 81 degrees Celsius wet bulb temperature, so basically if your aico fails you die. Nobody wants to live in a desert where you die by standing outside. In the Atacama desert in Chile the same thing is happening. It is so hot you can’t survive and nobody wants to be there. We need to be real about this, there is land on Earth nobody wants to be. It has to be open for whatever anyone anywhere wants to do.

Can we have the UN, Brics, African nations and all other global governments agree on a world map of uncontested land? Places where you can do whatever you want (as long as it helps against global warming/climate change). Similar to the high seas, where there can be no enforcement of law (even though there can be surveillance now).

Any company or person that wants to live in these places will be allowed to, provided they sequester CO2 and the sequestered carbon stays there. Do this on land and sea. No drilling for minerals allowed, those possible economic resources are not included and remain owned by the territory. Security is provided and can be augmented by the people involved. Why not allow this, it can only bring benefits.

Let nations draw their uncontested territory on the world map, instead of hoarding it for resources and allowing them to lie fallow while people with good intentions have no place to experiment.

Nato UN China Brics USA war Climate change global warming CO2 Roboeconomy

At least I was a student in the 1990’s China has been preparing for war with the US. Back then I read an article by Colin Powell in a monthly magazine on international diplomacy. He related that war with the US is all the Chinese worry about at their military academies. I guess back then it made a little sense, as the US had not yet opened the fossil fuel floodgates.

Chinese Defense Minister, Li Shangfu:

We're ready to increase military cooperation with Iran & Belarus.

🇨🇳🇮🇷🇧🇾 pic.twitter.com/FE8JAlnkDC

— 𝐄𝐡𝐬𝐚𝐧 𝐒𝐚𝐟𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐣𝐚𝐝 (@Safarnejad_IR) August 15, 2023

This is all well and good, and you might get caught in a fear driven narrowing of your awareness and become paranoid. No doubt there is good reason and China is certainly not coy about stealing from any country (for example when it comes to fishing in foreign waters). But lets review the sense and sensibility of actual war with the US.

Ironically in the 80’s China was less dependent on foreign inputs than today, although it was considered underdeveloped. Its population lived happily in their rural areas. Then the US helped move production to China, reduced the cost of saudi oil for China, basically allowed it to grow into its modern form. Power wrote in 1990’s that China would have to sustain growth to remain internally stabile. Growth requires resources like oil, gas, coal. In short relevant for the below is that without the US China would not be in such a precarious position today, or maybe I overestimate the influence of the US.

Why go to war?

There aren’t many reasons to go to war really. Before you start killing your own friends and family, ruining/halting the economy, diverting resources to devices like bombs who’s only purpose is to destroy themselves and humans, there really has to be a serious reason or someone must have become seriously crazy.

1. Attrocities

I guess if some country started slaughtering chinese people then there would be good reason for it to take action. This used to be much more logical than today. In a country like China where the relationship with government is tennuous at best, the Chinese are trying hard to obey the rules and be disciplined and work hard. During the Covid outbreak you could hear pleas of people who where welded into their highrises (some of which caught fire) about how they where really trying but couldn’t stand it no more. Does the Chinese state care about its citizens? Frankly I doubt it. Not enough to go to war over.

2. Resource shortages

Does the world have vital resources China needs? That questio is relative to the level of ‘growth’ China wants to sustain. It needs coal, it has a relationship with Australia which provides it. The warmongers in the US want to cut into this relationship. With who would China go to war over its coal? Not with the US, that would mean mutual anihilation. Not with Australia it has no power.

China depends on grain imports, but mainly for its meat industry. It has had disruption of that in recent years. China would never be dependent on a country it can not raid for its staple food security. It has a good relationship with Russia, a major grain producer. It would not have to go to war with Russia to get it, it has already bought futures of russian gas in return for replacement of western imports (which may indirectly also have come from China)

3. Ideological differences

Ideological differences where the reason for distance between the US, the west and China for a long time. China has since been invaded by US banks, has been put on a path of economistic growth, which has meant a lot of idiotic projects and entire half finished cities and never inhabited highrises, just like in the rest of the fossil/credit corrupted world. Its no longer communism. Xi has let this happen or it may not be reported to him. As people are now monitored and punished for unique thoughts with financial house arrest it is unlikely China can develop an ideology and export it. Its not the mentality. China does seem to hate muslims and try to drive them out (Uygurs). It did the same with Falung Gong. Any source of mental strength other than the state is not appreciated. Will it go to war for that?

4. Global power dynamics

Here we’re moving into the part where its ego against ego, and also where its about containment of ability. It may be that the basic nature of humans is fight for what they need, but also for what they want. This can include the subjugation of Taiwan by China, which is an important source of semiconductors for the US, as well as a territory dominated by its banks, you could say ‘globalism’ is the rule over society by international banks driving Economism, also wrongly titled Capitalism.

The goal of Economism is to defend and expand the power of banks, which is done by their control over resources and the tokens they are traded in (money). Of course many people are ‘fighting’ for their lifestyle in this system, which ultimately means some people are ready to kill for it or get others to do it. It is not difficult to recruit anyone if you have money. Its also not difficult to get powerfull weapons or mainting a believable military. In short armies are big economistic business, and they have the means to stay in business.

War means only cashflow for weapons. That gradually turns more desperate until the war ends. This is hardly the life banks want, which is why they have been signalling Putin to stop the nonsense from the start.

5. Personal idiosyncracies

You can say that the war in Ukraine that is now pulling on Russia’s table cloth (and that of other parts of the world) was born out of the isolation of Putin, his general management approach which is very hands off, and his mind being marinated with images of old russia grandeur by a philosopher friend (Alexander Dugin).

Some say that Xi in China has scared the pants off of anyone that wants to go against him, so he, like Putin is in a personal bubble and may develop ideas that are as ‘unsound’. as Putin’s. In the US we have the quite moronic Neocons who have taken over foreign affairs (Blinken).

It is always madness that starts wars, whether it is based on caring for others, caring about survival or caring for some idea. All normal behavior is cast aside and the planning of murder on a massive scale commences, because whoever is the target has fallen of the moral chessboard.

It is often only when you eliminate the lunatic at the center that conflicts stop, because normal people need a reason to do things, it has to make some sense in other ways than being a means to prevent court martial or a road to higher social/economic status.

Even in Iran it is clear there’s a class of insane religious leaders that have indoctrinated enough young men to do their bidding. Hitler took a page out of that book too, he empowered young men to raid the homes of the intelligentia. What do young men want more than being able to vent their aggression? In Iran they are the fashion police, while the older guard takes care of the slow process of hanging and obcene torture in prison. Insanity. Not healty.

The most sane country in the weak alliance with no purpose of China/Russia/Iran/Belarus and possibly african states like Niger are Belarus (and Niger). Belarus can not be captured by Russia, it has not sacrificed its men in the war with Ukraine. It has tried to walk a fine line because apparently either Lukashenko cares about his people, sees no benefit in the chaos or war, or he is as eager to see Russia sink in internal conflict (as do the other former Soviet satellites). He seems to have Putin’s ear and be able to create this dasha fireplace atmosphere which allows him to prevent Putin from killing Prigozhin. Putin likes loyalty but right now there is no commanding anyone. Prigozhin and Lukashenko seem to have left the Ukraine battlefield predending to threaten Poland. They are smoking sigarets behind the barn.

A private jet belonging to Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has crashed with all passengers and crew reportedly dying upon impact. #Prigozhin #Wagner pic.twitter.com/qWudAUcn1d

— Paul Golding (@GoldingBF) August 23, 2023

If you took the situation seriously for a minute, so Belarus and Wagner invading Poland and NATO responding and a full scale thermonuclear war resulting you quickly discover that none of the parties except perhaps Putin would want that. Even a small nuclear war throws our planet in darkness for decades caused by dust blown into the stratosphere, darkness very few would survive. It really is suicide to trigger such a war. It always was, so it never was a problem. Donald Rhumsfeld who invented the cold war (“Russia has secret weapons! What weapons? They are secret!”) knew it, but it was good business for M&M enterprises. A nuclear world war can only happen by unfortunate accident. It would not even help with climate change and global warming, it would just be the final crescendo before humans went extinct.

Global Standdown

To me the idea we will have to keep fighting for our resources seems nonsensical. We know so much about our planet from satellites and we can analyse possible futures and threats so wel, if we take the time to set up the systems, that we can probably predict exactly what the challenges and potentials are of each region. All the individual minds that distort this understanding at the moment will be gradually phased out, and we already have systems of minds (UN) that see sense where legacy minds (like Putin) fail to. NATO is a peace alliance, which is now bleeding Russia dry. If this succeeds it leaves only China and the US to contest resources. Are they going to? Why really? Is there anything in the USA the Chinese need?

I believe that if Russia is defeated there will be no more wars. What will happen is that China and the US/Europe come to agreements to help each other generate wealth and combat climate change (which will be devastating in the best case scenario). The challenge of increasing the slim odds humanity survives the next 400 years is big enough. Small wars or skirmishes may happen. A conflict is a good way to control aggressive groups of people while effectively reducing their number. The main reason for a belligerent attitude is not understanding the potential of renewables and not understanding the challenges of climate change. NATO and the UN do understand these at least a bit better.

So China can back Belarus and Iran, but realy it must have quite nuanced thoughts about the level of support they will give. Russia same story. If it moves towards peace, good. Is China going to back an invasion into NATO countries? It really can’t afford to. Does it want a world war? Nope. It seems the world is waiting for Putin to announce a new era of peace and cooperation, hopefully for him not with his last breath.

(full disclosure : I din’t think Putin was serious about invading Ukraine so I might be wrong)

AI compute is increasing in efficiency and speed at breakneck speed. Nvidia just announced its ‘Grace Hopper’ GPU hartdware and its going to make it cheaper for industry to analyse and run ‘inference’ (AI speak for think) about what it is trained to understand. That can be anything from controlling robots, analysing visual data, your personal profile, talking to you in your own (cloned) voice etc. etc.

You will not realize AI is applied in your life, mainly to make you spend money, to homogenize your behavior, to addict you to movies and products, to make you ignore climate change etc. etc. Virtual reality is already becoming so appealing its addictive just like internet.

The question is : Is this all fair to you, the citizen. What if the entertainment provided to you to suggest purchases to you (which is all commercial content atm) is also influencing your political affiliation and making you vote for people that do not care for you. Britanny Kaiser wrote a nice book called “Targeted” about this happening during the Trump presidential campaign and Brexit vote with abused facebook data. This is not an imaginary threat but a very real one.

The window of one voice being able to educate people or point out facts may be closing, as its way easier to inject ideas into someone’s social media stream in the most attractive way possible than for any individual to get the attention and appeal to someone

Are we aware of this in our political system. Do political parties want to live in a world where citizens suddenly change opinions and nobody understands why? Where you get personal looking treatement that seduces you because the seller has access to personalized analysis of you, and you are not aware this is the case? How can you make any straight progress or any change from an individual preference perspective against an economy that is weaponized so strongly against you?

There need to be laws that limit this or AI weaponized companies will rob you blind, if not the big ones with an image, then the smaller more desperate ones in time. AI and virtual reality applied to profit generation will be like hypnotizing locusts. You have one chance to defend yourself, next election you will be made to forget about it.

Overheard conversation :

Big Oil : “So with this AI you can basically profile people based on their shopping habits and netflix preferences, and push them further into their consumption niche?”

AI Expert : “Yes, well you can only do and learn so much and the more you are online the better we can predict the effects”

Big Oil : “Ok, can you make sure they don’t care about the world burning and want to fly and shop as much as they can”

AI Expert : “Sure can!”

Big Oil : “And I guess making them vote for our candidate is also easy” AI Expert : “Haha, good joke!”

Big Oil : “Just testing, of course there is no candidate not on our payrole.”

AI Expert : “But seriously with enough personalized messages and algorithm tweaks everybody will be happy in their own bubble and hate or fear the rest of the world”

Big Oil : “Hmm.. so we can worry even less about our image”

AI Expert : “Frankly people will ignore you, they will be too distracted and amused”

Big Oil : “And a computer does this for us, it sounds too easy”

Check the bottom of this page for the CCC challenge details.

Intro

The world needs to work on solving the immens amount of CO2 and Methane currently being dumped in the atmosphere. One way is to organize a challenge. We have the X-Prize and other competitions, and they are good. I haven’t yet seen any tangible results from them, and one reason may be that all billionairs are caught in a web of trade and finance that of course makes them dependent on cooperation from people that do not think about the future. Everyone has an excuse.

We are seeing interesting developments in solar power (more like final release of existing solutions) and carbon capture and conversion, for example using H2 and CO2 to make long chain hydrocarbons (jet fuel). This may reduce waste of CO2 (as a concentrated raw material) and help skim some from our atmosphere (which isn’t easy) but whatever you do at the moment, the system is set up (by banks) such that it drives more emissions. CDR credits drive emissions, generated fuel will be burned. Biomass conversion will be burned, generation of H2 effectively wastes 70% of the renewable energy so it too drives emissions, if it is not made from fossil fuels in the first place.

The economy likes to burn sequestered carbon

So there needs to be a clear tweak tot he system to do real carbon capture and sequestration. The way it is proposed now avoids the need for it, the thing is to pump CO2 into the ground. CO2 is not a valuable commodity so the banks don’t see a way this reduces cashflow so this is allowed, also because it can help extract more oil (this is how CO2 pumping is already used), and buy time to sell more fossil fuels. So the economy is NOT interested in that store of CO2.

If you synthesize hydrocarbons, jet fuel than for 100% sure the economy IS interested in that resource. It will be claimed to be a crime against humanity not to use ‘carbon neutral’ fuels, and there’s a point to that. It is a great way to develop the technology as well, because air travel is a major way to generate cashflow with fossil fuels. Generating cashflow is the only thing banks and thus our economy cares about. Really. The only fucking thing.

Extra economic, self sustaining solutions

So while industry is building capacity to generate jetfuel for airtravel, it will be hoarding resources and not reduce CO2 emissions. It will make the installations for generation of jetfuel cheaper. Now the tweak we need to accomplish is to use those installations or installations like them in an Extra-economic fashion. This means outside the control of banks or the economy, away from people that try to exploit the resource created. Making it too energy intensive (what ‘expensive’ means) compared to alternatives to get too, or too deadly.

Extraeconomic activities, those that do not mix with the wider economy, are not necessarily dangerous, the solar panels on your roof are extraeconomic. You installed them, and you sell your power to the grid, but you don’t really have too, and banks do not see cashflow from the energy you generate with them. You own them and nobody is messing with that. You can have extraeconomic homes, streets, cities, regions when it comes to renewables, and you will find you will have to protect them against banks who want you to be dependent and who want to profit of your effort. With carbon capture this can not be the case, banks will force you to sell whatever fuel or other material you create.

So to drive invention and a modular scalable solution I would think we need a kind of colum, which at the top can receive solar energy, and at the bottom dumps carbon in some form, maybe pure carbon soot, maybe jet fuel. It has to have a resonable size, so let’s say 20 foot high and 8 feet by 8 feet (or the size of a shipping container put upright). This gives it about 5 kwP of insolation at the top. It can also have organic matter growing in it, but the point is the sun is on top, the carbon leaves at the bottom, the thing can be lifted up, so in a landscape tiled with these colums a huge layer of carbon grows underneath while the CC Columns rise. This is a lot like the peat forests or swamps of the past, where organic matter constantly added more carbon refuse to the bottom of the swamp or forest floor.

Rules:

The CCC is a 20 foot container volume, either flat or vertical, to be tiled on a flat surface. It does not have to include the container, its just a volume and it may help with logistics. Whoever can design a system in that volume that can capture and sequester CO2 at the lowest resource and practical scale up cost per container wins. Total supply chain analysis and operation manual must be provided for scale up.

• The winner of the design context can now win 5000,-
• The deadline for the design is november 1st 2023
• Every participant will compare their solution to two other entries on relevant metrics to create an overall ranking.
• If you or your group wants to participate please email info@greencheck.nl as early as possible.

Prize money contributers

Frits Rincker 5000,-

If you want to add to the prize money please notify us via info@greencheck.nl

The physics community is trying to reconcile Einstein’s relativity theory and quantum mechanical reality. It doesn’t seem to work for gravity for some reason. When a particle like an electron travels through space-time and through a double slit (where it actually looks like it passes through both until we measure it) it is said we can’t say anything about the gravity effects on the electron because ‘gravity is not a quantum theory’. It seems the basic meaning of that is that we have not quantized gravity or found a way to prove gravity is quantized.

I believe we should not consider an electron as traveling through spacetime unless we view it as a distrubance in it, it is not a thing apart from spacetime. The easiest analogy is sound, which is vibrating air, yet we can almost observe it like an object traveling. Vortexes in air and water can travel a long way and transfer their energy over relatively long distances. The trick is that a moving piece of spacetime can separate from the rest, like a moving volume of air and water can too.

I believe that of electrons are vortexes in spacetime, then photons are compression of space time. The reason for that is that every time too much energy ends up trying to disturb a volume of space time that is too small, spacetime starts ejecting photons. It gets compressed and this compression propagates as it tries to uncompress. Intil it hits a patch of spacetime where it can dump its ‘energy’ having been caught in an electromagnetic cage in the mean time. Everything radiates, so spacetime is being moved to other places all the time, in the mean time it does not take up space nor time.

One of the things that amazes me is that if everything is quantized, then why don’t we see the effects of it when we observe the stars. I mean why doesn’t it look like there’s pixels, like an image without anti-aliasing. Do you mean to tell me that light can travel billions of lightyears and never have to adjust to fit a grid of any kind? It seems that way. Spacetime thus can’t be quantized if it is a substrate along which light travels. Yet it is or there would be no limit to the speed of light. The trick is that light has to abide by spacetime’s ‘conduction’ speed and thus it actually creates it. You can understand that if light could travel everywhere instantly there would only be one place for it to go, it would not seem to be spread out and varied etc. There would be no space.

But what if we live in a pixelated space time, would we be able to notice it. If light actually did occupy very fine pixels in our field of view, we would see a slight difference in say the starry night sky by moving a slight distance, but it would be a noticable shift. What if we moved a camera sideways and we’d see stars jumping from one place to another? We don’t, but could we if spacetime was indeed quantized. I don’t think so.

We learn that light travels as a wave. If it comes across a double slit it forms two wave fronts that can interfere. Maybe that is where we can get our answer. At every point in spacetime through which a light wave travels, it emanates a wave front that carries its photon (spacetime) packet forward. If spacetime is pixelated this will be anti-aliassed at every point in spacetime and appear smooth.

The wave properties always smooth out the direction of travel, effectively distributing it and then forcing the energy to progress along the straightest path (unless spacetime is stretched or compressed). Only if we gather enough photons from a certain direction we discover they have the structure of the original planet (a type of heavenly body with constant structure). All the wavefronts can cancel and recombine and basically error correct. But could we prove or disprove whether the light passed though a pixilated screen or medium for example? Not if that screen did not itself take up space (so block light).

I think because photons emerge in spacetime and travel through it you can say it is quantized. The quantum is spacetime compression. More energetic radiation has a higher frequency, and thus more compressed space traveling on it. It is very much like sound, where a total compression of molecules (consuming all energy that gives them their average distance), travels through it until it dissipates (which doesn’t happen with spacetime). Does a high frequency tone at maximum volume allowed by the medium carry more energy? I would say yes. Could it carry more energy? Only if you increase the frequency.

For that reason then also gravity is quantized, but the distributed nature of wave fronts causes all particles we can observe to be anti-aliassed in it as they exist as various convolutions of spacetime. If too much spacetime is ‘tied up’ like that it gets streched, and this causes passing other spacetime ‘knots’ to move into it based on probability. Hence gravity. Its like a sieve with gradually bigger holes on one side. More stuff will pass through that part as you use it.

Quantum mechanics describes the dynamics of the convolutions of spacetime, which can be extemely varied. Spacetime itself I imagine is like an ever evolving graph where nodes appear and disappear due to their desire to appear against a ‘pressure’ of many existing nodes. The ‘spooky action at a distance’ or entanglement wich could have long distance effects at speeds higher than lightspeed can come about because in the creation of the entangled convolutions some edges remain intact. Once one of the two is tested (destroyed) the lost edges allow the other to become the opposite type, as they where created as opposites to begin with but had not been forced to decide. This however could also all be a misinterpretation of observations.

(The problem with wormholes, a concept alluded to above, is that there’s so much internal pressure in the spacetime graph and I don’t yet understand how vertexes connect or find each other. The way to neutralize the forces may be to spin fast, to have homgeneous direction, like laminar flow. We know theres less pressure if water flows faster, because the water molecules are moving sideways less. So total separation of parts of spacetime may be possible, but one would think against massive resistance of the same.)

One can wonder if the ‘stretch’ and ‘compression’ of spacetime is quantized. The problem is that you never get to any fundamental thing unless you become very abstract about it. In short if you imagine a point that wants to split in two points you can have the basis of space time. The splitting creates both space and time. I wrote about this idea before. The ‘desire’ to split and then be two or more space time ‘balls’ or ‘particles’ which can form a medium for waves to propagate through is what drives the expansion of our universe. There is enormous outward pressure from spacetime, but it can be ‘misdirected’ into convolutions that constitute mass and particles which are stabile for a certain period of time. It seems then the exact number of vertexes is quantized, and spacetime’s total volume is, as is its energy potential.

Gravity however may not seem quantized because its effect is a phenomenon in a vast ocean of these edges and vertexes and on top of that smoothed out by all the particles propagating as waves.