Greencheck.nl

This is about the recent killings and terrorism, which we think is directly linked to our need for oil and gas, our arms industry. By adopting more renewables and increasing wealth and water security we may reduce these threats.

We are trying to understand the rise of shootings and killings in Europe and the US. The reasons are more complex than indoctrination of Islamic State. Depressed and innately agressive persons can at times decide to choose a course of action that ultimately destroys them. This is not always an accident. Today it is pretty easy to track down people with hurt feelings, in emotional stress, hatefull. Especially if social media are used to express these feelings.

We can group killers in different groups :

1. Young people that get sucked into or raised in islamic ideology which turns extreme. Factors are
   1. Peer pressure
   2. Desire for freedom and adventure
   3. Continued indoctrination by a small social group
   4. Possibly sexually frustrated
   5. Antagonized against the world
   6. May have lost family members
2. Violent people that see an opportunity
   1. These can be tracked and approached to use them for ideological goals
3. Depressed people that turn violence on themselves
   1. These can be tracked and approached to use them for ideological goals
4. Highly abstract thinking persons that can be easily influenced given the right approach
5. People who want to act against a wrong they correctly percieve.

It is clear that in the islamic world there exist recruiters, who look for sensitive targets, which are then groomed following a recipy which usually yields succes. This shows there is an external system of people that will use an individual as a tool to turn extreme. It depends on the quality of this system, and the sensitivity of the individual whether this works. Examples of this go back to the times of Napoleon, who’s second in command in Egypt got knifed by a scribe who got indoctrinated by a arab warlord. He would fall in category 4.

“The suicide bomber in Ansbach had had contact with an unknown person that significantly influenced him” (source)

Today tracking people that are ‘vulnerable’ is easier than ever. Social media, phone locations, financial data can show what people live like and what they are interested in. I believe we underestimate the ease with which people can be influenced by the large army of coaches and motivators looking for work. These peopl I come across a lot at (government funded) renewables events, there to waste your time, to find out about you. We have the NSA, CIA spying, Google, Microsoft, Apple spying, and sometimes we have people just crossing your path to waste your time. This is no secret by the way, it can be readily confirmed that coaches are hired to organize and run citizen participation events, really to give the citizen the feeling of being heard so the government plan (run by some industrial lobby group) can be executed with expedience. What else are people with these skills used for?

Intelligence and secret services both monitor and can create threats

I think we underestimate the role of manipulations of political opponents in the current situation. People can be changed, impeded, by many factors, including pathogens (viruses that alter personality), financial unfortunate events etc. The question should be why? To what end? Most people are not in any secretive organization (like the CIA or other secret service) engaged in any activity that drives towards violence or some impulsive act. Who are these people that are?

This violent background of our society exists because of our dependence on fossil fuels, for which all nations compete.

One of the reasons in my opinion is that we don’t see our reality clearly, and one of the main topics in that respect is our assumption that money is something we can trust, that we can build upon and that the only thing we need to watch in life is how much money we make or have. Because we don’t pay attention to the volume of oil, gas and coal traded around the world, because we don’t pay attention who owns it first and how that state or company agrees to allow us access to it, we don’t see why people would be angry or fight. For example, Iran, delivers massive amounts of fossil fuels to the world. It doesn’t have to, it could be wealthy in its own right (expecially given its solar wealth). We don’t thank it, but we can not produce the oil, gas in the West. We get it out of some relationship we never analyse, perhaps of an imminent nuclear threat to Iran from the US?

If we don’t live in Gaza we don’t see our brothers and sisters die. No matter how wrong terrorism is, we may fear it, others live it on a daily basis. If such a person arrives in the free west, and realizes the free west is selling weapons, gaining oil and gas (Gaza has gas reserves), and playing fearfull of ‘terrorism’, this might agitate this person, and with reason. Simply said : If a US drone kills a syrian civilian then this means the relatives of this civilian want to destroy the drone, destroy the person controlling it. No individual has the innate desire to give up and die when attacked. A sane person wants to fight. Correct that : A sane person with no other options that give it a future wants to fight. Our best protection at the moment against sane people wanting to hurt western citizens is distance, opportunity and their overwhelmingly peacefull nature.

Because groups are well monitored, only individuals can start their own revolution, these micro revolutions are very hard to prevent. The individuals don’t even need to be crazy.

Ubiquitous surveillance can stop organizations that commit crimes, even though going full analog makes a group of individuals very hard to track. Lone individuals that decide to act are next to impossible to detect, even though you can scope out those sensitive to such diseastrous changes of heart. The killer in Munich was depressed, on antidepressants. Two big risk factors. The killer in Nice was known to be violent. He could have been monitored more closely. But even completely normal individuals that have emotional attachement to victims of US drone strikes, or that feel Islamic values are superior than christian values, can decide to commit a crime, just like completely sane military commanders can decide to kill an enemy combattant.

The book Crime and Punishment  of Dostojevsky is about a man who wonders why the state has the right to kill, but the individual does not. He goes through all kinds of weakminded torments, commits a crime, then gets tracked by a detective that doesn’t really know how to catch him. He wants to be caught, he doesn’t want to live in his guilty state. In the end he chooses to be punished. The book is about the weakness of normal people, who are supposed to be working in normal jobs, and should not develop the skill that is only necessary in extreme circumstances. The crime in the book is quite nonsensical really, very much a random result of the desire of the main character to commit it. The problem today is that we have a rational reason for some individual to retalliate against innocent people in the West. We also have people with the skills to commit crimes coming from the battlefields armed and funded by the West. It is a miracle  (and the work of our police forces) that we don’t see more attacks.

The people that do commit crimes in our names, the military, needs to be driven only by the desire to bring peace, not by commercial motives or a need to secure fossil fuel resources.

I think the best way to combat individuals going on killing sprees, when we have identified all groups that may turn violent, is to undermine all aspects that drive these people to these crimes. They are:

1. Poverty
2. Alienation, indoctrination
3. Sexual frustration (not an insignificant factor)
4. Access to weapons
5. Random killing of family and friends
6. Oil dependent countries committing crimes against them

The world needs to calm down and move towards a peacefull mindset, in order for all people emotionally involved in what happens in the Middle East building up motivation to commit a crime. We need to drive renewables, solar and wind, cheap water technology to help those communities, instead of subjecting them to suffering because we need the oil and gas. We need to make sure the reasonings toward hate are not injected into young minds by clerics, that the violent lifestyle are not advertised online or elsewhere. Only then we can prevent these microrevolutions which seem inevitable to occur on almost mathematically predictable intervals otherwise.

 

 

 

 

 

It sounds like a strange suggestion, an insensitive one, but it’s time to start ignoring terrorism. John Kerry stated that Islamic State is as big a threat as Climate Change, obviously he does not know to much about climate change.

US deaths cause, 2015

Suicide: 43,000
Motor accidents 32,000
Gun homicide: 13,286
Domestic violence: 1,600
Islamic terrorism: 19
Sharks: 1

— The Int'l Spectator (@intlspectator) July 27, 2016

Terrorism is shocking, but mostly because the media make sure we don’t miss any terrorist event. It is because we desire to see news that shocks us with things that happen elsewhere, because we don’t realize it is not in our lives, not in our world these things happen.

Focus on the problems you can fix

Islamic State may kill another thousand people in bombings this year, of course we don’t want that to happen, but if it does then it still doesn’t constitute the biggest threat we face. We can list the abuse of alcohol, the pollution through fossil fuel use, drug abuse, weapons in the hands of the wrong people, cars as much bigger threats. Also us being confronted with these crimes does not really instruct us what to do. It makes us feel powerless, and we need to feel powerfull to fight climate change.

To compare IS with climate change is really not getting climate change, but it does possibly result in the right behaviour, namely that we fight IS as hard as we fight climate change. This is because IS threatens order, it causes priorities to lie with its destruction, not with fighting climate change or reducing fossil fuel use. It is a tool in the hands of those that want to keep us occupied with war, which can lead to more war, instead of replacing the thing people fight for and over, namely fossil fuels.

We need to ignore terrorism, reduce it’s prominence in the media, and at the same time let our police and intelligence agencies look for it, find it and neutralize it, while the normal citizen needs more information on how to prevent attacks, for instance how do you scope out a place so you know it can’t be attacked. How do you recognize a bomber?

We are in a transition, and it is the desire of those that like the status quo to distract us with useless information, to scare us with meaningless concepts like ‘the economy’. It is natural to desire to see death and destruction, we are fascinated by it, movies make billions showing it to us. But we need to focus on the transition to renewables, on securing our food production, on shutting down and controlling fossil fuel companies and banks. They are the major threat we face. The fight against them should be headline news every damn day until we control them.

Record temperatures in Kuwait

• The Middle East will become unlivably hot
• There are ways to green the desert, and create a cooler climate
• Solar resources are such that this is a economically viable solution
• CO2 sequestration potential is huge, same situation as in Chile

Today temperatures in Kuwait are up to 54 degrees Celsius. This is unbearably hot. The country is dry and sandy, wich was once different, long ago, when the oil deposits where formed. Then it was a tropical place with swamps where plants sank into capturing Carbon from the atmosphere and storing it. Enormous amounts of it for millions of years.

In those days it was hot as well, up to 12 degrees hotter. This means that even though Kuwait is a desert, and neighbouring Saudi Arabia is as well, it doesn’t have to be. It’s a matter of adding water. Of course the crust of the Earth has moved around and opened and closed water bodies and changed winds, but if we lool at the Saudi peninsula we can cleary see how the winds blow, over it, and we can see where we would have to inject water to cause more rains, more plants to grow, trees, to cool the air and remove CO2. The potential is there.

Water vapour is a greenhouse gas, the hotter it gets, the more water vapour, the hotter it will get

Maybe we should focus on regions where it is easy to plant and grow trees first. India is planting trees en masse, it is one of those things nature doesn’t do too efficiently by itself, just like shaping the landscape to catch water. A tree seed is a lottery ticket for the species, it might become viable and grow into a new member. Every apple has 8 or so seeds that can grow in a new apple tree, look at the exponential factor that would be in place 1 tree, maybe 20 apples per year, 8 seeds, that’s 160 new trees every year, after year 5 you get 160 x 160 new trees every year, after another 5 160 x 160 x 160 = 4.096.000 trees, and 5 years later 655.360.000.

India plants 50 million trees 

in one day

“In December, African nations pledged to reforest 100 million hectares“

Desalination as we reported on it is making quick strides in becoming less complicated or expensive, less energy intensive. Ionic desalination can be delived in a long lasting installation that uses only a fraction of now common RO desalination plants, and it can run on solar heat or electricity. In humid climates water is in the air, the only trick is to get it out. This can be done by solar electric cooling mechanisms, some of which are also highly durable (say a panel and a peltier element, or some kind of ammonia filled heat pump).

Death valley, until today the place with the hottest temps on record..no longer! Here during a flash flood, that does not permeate the ground (see this post)

In the desert the material for larg scale structures like channels or aquaducts is readily available : sand. No need for cement when you have TerraWatts of solar energy pounding down from the sky. Lots of power to run electric devices that do whatever is necessary. Even brine water as found in the Dead Sea is a rich source of energy, and energy can be used to irrigate, desalinate, plant and manage new life. The formula for loss of life today is largely “We added human technology” but this same method can reverse the trends. Technology combined with renewables can make the planet green again, robots that plant, dig, manage crops. Its done in the fossil fertized intensive farming industry, but why not use the tools to do the same without the intention to harvest?

Assuming that regional warming will make cities uninhabitable requires the assumption of no action at al

The use of the 80’s invention called the Saltwater Greenhouse, if kept out of the impractical hands of big investors and into that of smart entrepeneurs, can mean more food, more crops, more green stuff growing while also delivering more fresh water for plants growing outside. The art will be to use the available resources, try to create cascading (positive effects).

The art of water allocation, counted by the minute..

“Using the normal measure of temperature, the study shows 45C would become the usual summer maximum in Gulf cities, with 60C being seen in places like Kuwait City in some years.” (by 2070)

With the application of available technologies, including that of making solar grade silicon for panels using solar heat, the Middle East can turn itself green, removing considerable amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere in the process.

Deadly heatwaves predicted in the Gulf States

Persian Gulf Would Experience Deadly Heat

Sensible Temperature Reaches 165 Farenheit in Iran

Elon Musk thrills this morning by publishing his “Master plan part deux” to build an electric truck and passenger bus, and working to make it possible to share your Tesla to increase its utility (and cut emissions from taxi’s and other modes of transport). He shows us that you can drive towards a new world by creating it. Other companies are doing the same, we listed some that make electric trucks or work on it already. Tesla is not the only company with a mind to bring about the advent of sustainable energy, but there could be a lot more.

How does Elon do this? He focusses on what he wants to achieve, then relentlessly works to achieve it. He chooses his goals so he can care as a person for its succes.

In general we see a division in society between the ones that want quick wins from actions that support the fossil/banking system, and ones that struggle against the pro fossil media and smears and frankly open attacks to bring about things that will make us healthier, strongers, safer, more peacefull. These people, with Donald Trump as a prime example, are the assholes of this world.

You can sit by a buffet and wait until you get your shrimp cocktail, or you can go out in the field and sow and harvest the grains you turn into bread. Many interpret that as being either on top or at the bottom of the food chain. We wonder whether eating meat makes this feeling stronger, this preditory fantasy. The fact is, if you are waiting for shrimp you are dealing with a catering service (banks/fossil fuel companies) that will not be able to keep serving shrimp. The fossil/banking system will deplete shrimp, and all other foods, because they destroy the habitat of shrimp, quite literally. This fossil fuel economy is like fireworks, amazing when it happens, until it stops happening.

Don’t be the asshole that waits for the shrimps, or champagne, or at least not all the time. Spend some time replacing the fossil fuel system, give support to people that try to, give a voice to the opportunities of renewables and sustainability. Work to achieve a better world, not a world tagged with ‘economic growth’. You don’t have to work for anyone if you work for a world in which there is abundance of life and resources. You don’t have to fight and kill anyone if you work for a world where people don’t feel abused or lacking of resources. Don’t hate others, they are in the same perdicament as you. Cooperate with them because renewables can bring much more wealth than fossil fuels ever could.

Being green is not about being weak or lax or lazy, in fact it is harder than using fossil fuels. It takes more attention, although renewable products like solar panels are becoming more and more plug and play products (also because of Solar City). This is because at least right now, with renewables, you are asked to take control. You have to have an idea where you going, like no more power bill, or no more gas bill, or more trees in the street so it is cooler in the summer.

How to not be an asshole? Have a vision of cooperation and support while being strong yourself, not one filled with foes, imagining yourself to be weak and vulnerable. Renewables can give you that strength and autonomy, that is why we promote renewables and renewable technology.

Nicola Tesla demonstrated a radio controlled boat about a century ago..

Flying drones now come in all shapes and sizes, from quadcopters to high altitude planes. On land drone cars and robots have also been build. We have an interest in water drones, autonomous ships, as this allows us to work on ecorestoration for the oceans in remote places.

A number of system already exist. The biggest differentiator is the intention and budget of the projects in question. DARPA and the Pentagon have been working on AI/autonomous devices for decades now. It would be shamefull if they had not already combined the available tech.

A home grown project that aims to cross the pacific is a bit more heroic. It also shows it can be done on a shoestring budget.

Another project similar to the above is

At the university of Delft students constructed a solar hydrofoil boat, which not only runs on solar but can travel at hydrofoil speeds and efficiency. Visibly carrying at least 70 kg at considerable speed.

We are building an autonomous boat just to see if we can and to create a cheap platform for oceanic applications. We think we need the folloing features :

1. GPS
2. Compass
3. Radio contro
   1. LoRa
   2. GSM?
4. A computer on board
5. Ability to control servos

If you would read that the prime minister of Canada is now the PM of England, and will go to Canada to talk business you’d wonder how the hell that was possible. Don’t leaders have to be from their own soil to have authority? Mark Carney doesn’t attract such responses, even though he is part of a system that is more powerfull than parliament, the banking system. In it he switched jobs from Bank of Canada governor to Bank of England governor. As if there where no nations really.

Banks are our governments. They control the amount of money we have, our behaviour, in response to the availability of fossil resources.

The banks are powerfull, we know it because they seem to dictate a lot of what happens, they are after all the managers of our economies, and our economies are holy. We have written about what banks really represent : They represent our access to fossil fuels, also our ability to organize. The access to fossil fuels aspect we call it’s membership of the carboncredit system, because money is carbon credit. You can only buy oil in Dollars, you constantly need more Dollars, Euro, Yen to keep going, because most things you or manufactureres of what you need do requires fossil fuels. Those fuels get burned and evaporate (H2O and CO2) and then we need more money.

In a fossil fuel economy we need to find money time and time again because we spend it on fuel, which we burn.

The role of the banks has been to manage the amount of money that can be spend on fossil fuels (directly or indirectly) so that prices remain stabile. It is easy to see this is the case, because if a bank loans you $1 billion and the gas station has no fuel or there is no gas or coal, your billion will not be worth anything. Nothing will be for sale. On the other hand, if you are loaned $100 and there is plenty of fuel for sale you will find prices of everything will be very low, as all fuel suppliers compete for the same $100. The beauty of this system is that 1. The price of fuel says nothing about how much is available. 2. The banks can tell you stories about ‘weak economy’ or ‘bullish prospects’ and control how much money you have, while you think they, like you respond to external circumstances. The means of exchange (money) has become the means of control.

To maintain price stability the amount of money we can spend and the amount of resources available need to be carefully matched, most importantly the amount of fossil fuels. Price stability means steady incomes, no contract renegotiations or failures.

Recently the carboncredit system has gotten some pressure from divest movements. Divesting from fossil fuel companies will not shut fossil fuel down. This is because to drill for oil you do not need money, you need fossil fuels. If from the start of the oil era there had been no money, dollars, there would still have been an oil boom, because you drill using diesel powered machines, not money powered machines. This independence of the credit system makes the fossil industry so damn powerfull. They decide what they do. If a bank or investor divests it really doesn’t have any effect on them. Imagine what happens when Shell comes to you and says “Hey, we need your truck for this drilling job, if we are done we pay you with 1000 barrels of oil”. Would you say yes? Did they need money?

You can drill oil without money, you can pay for everything in oil

The banking part of the carboncredit system does suffer from divestment movements, because it reduces their control (which was more or less voluntarily to begin with), and loss of control over the fossil fuel industry means loss of control over everything. Renewables are also undermining that control, we strongly advocate for more renewables, because they reduce cashflow, which means banks earn less and become less influentual. But banks need to respond to the divestment threat. It is real because renewables are slowly becoming cheaper than fossil alternatives, so that even in a system where the money supply is geared to the fossil fuel supply, and prices of energy are thus zero (if you supply credit to the system so that peopel can buy fuel the cost to the people is zero) renewables become preferred. This slippage of the carboncredit system is a serious threat to banking and we welcome it.

“The thing that keeps central bankers up at night is the sort of sudden change in risk. We saw that in 2007- 2008,” he said. “We’ve had risk of that in recent years and we don’t want to have one around climate.” (source)

Mark Carney want to avoid ‘risk around climate’. He does not aknowledge that banks are this risk. They banks that keep investing and promoting fossil fuel use through driving expansion of the economy. What assets is he talking about, coal fired power plants? Gas power plants? Grid infrastructure? Kerkosine airtraffic? He frames the situation in the usual powerless way..

Climate change is what Carney called the “tragedy of the horizon,” an allusion to the classic environmental economic problem the “tragedy of the commons,” but amplified because the impacts of climate change will be felt by future generations.

Of course this is a perfect way to suggest we wait until we arrive at the horizon, which we never will. This is necessary because Carneys banking system only works if it can create credit that can be used to buy resources that can allow one to manufacture, transport in other words, fossil fuels. Carney basically rings the canadian bell wondering if the tarsand oil will keep flowing, if the UK will get access to the trees for its power plants, fracking gas, so the Bank of England can keep creating Pounds that can buy stuff made with that energy.

“because the impacts of climate change will be felt by future generations” Wake up Carney!

In Canada in the mean time we find Trudeau who seems to have a green splinter in his finger, he and Obama seem to make a green front. Renewables are taking over the conservative states, they are adding to the wealth in the US, they are becoming a lobbying force to recon with. You can live a healthy and prosperous life in the US without ever being a lakey of the fossil fuel industry. As a result the banking industry also loses it’s influence. Their gatekeeper role in the distribution of energy, and thus productive power is waning.

The moment renewable energy sources can be made by a production chain that only uses renewable energy sources the banks are no longer relevant. Lets call this the RoboEconomic Singularity.

The thing Carney worries about the most is the independence of the production of renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind turbines from bank credit. This is largely prevented by still huge land costs, and the fact that the production process of renewable energy sources is dependent on fossil fuels, fossil powered logistices etc. But this can change. Why is that such a big deal? Because when we make wind turbine blades with wind energy the cost of those blades drop to the maintenance cost of the turbine, which can be paid for with turbine energy. This means banks play no role in the whole renewable industry. Also the turbines delivered by a 100% renewables powered production chain will be priced very low and growth of the wind industry (in this example) will not be limited by the willingness of banks to allocate credit towards it. This is the roboeconomic singularity if you want to give it a name.

[Carney] noted that global commitments to reduce carbon represent $5-$7 trillion (U.S.) a year in clean infrastructure opportunities. (if you build it with fossil fuel credit)

So not only does Carney face a dramatic fall in looting potential (depleting natural resources), an attack on bank control over fossil resources by divestment movements, a threat of catastrophic failure of food and water security (and security in general) and thus trade (take for example Russia that took it’s grain off the world market when they recently experienced a drought), but also one of irrelevance of bank credit because industrial production moves to renewables they can make without fossil fuels. Even in this clusterfuck of threats Carney manages to present the damage banks do by driving the fossil fuel economy as a ‘tragedy on the horizon’ in other words, his desire is to keep going. This is why we aught to dispise bankers.

A $1 trillion investment in renewable powered production of renewable energy sources will make the expense and emissions associated with the other $4-$6 Trillion unnecessary

The way the reasonable governments, those that see all alternatives, not only the ones that secure their lifestyle, should respond is by instituting control over both banks and the fossil industry at once. Use the army to do that. The economic forces will deplete all resources, the banks are their main proponents, economics is a marketing strategy for fossil fuels, both need to be controlled at one time. Then the exit to renewables needs to be dictated in an orderly fashion.

“If they do not face the issue head on, he said, the global economy could face a “climate Minsky moment.” This refers to economist Hyman Minsky, who suggested that bankers, traders and other financial players periodically cause financial crises, a recent example being the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis in the U.S.”

So Carney threatens the world, he says his comrades in banks and financial institutions will throw a fit, will pretend there is a huge crisis, contract liquidity, starve us suddenly, to make sure we all suffer and choose to obey their control. While we should control the banks. To do this we need to wake up to its role, not only look for money, but for the thing we buy with money, and decide we no longer wish to depend on it. If Carney where a union leader, say of the medical sector, and he would say in parliament “We will strike and cause grave damage to all of you if you threaten to make us obsolete” the response would be that a judge ruled that no medical staff could go on strike because all citizen need to be protected against potentially lethal wanton chaos. We need to take this threat seriously and respond by taking control of the carboncredit system and organize its orderly end.

P.S.

In the dutch financial times there’s a piece about the instability that will be caused by the energy transition. It says that we will need the army to ensure order if we don’t slow down the change to renewables.

“Als we niet bereid zijn om onze eigen energietransitie geleidelijker te laten verlopen, zullen we nu al militaire maatregelen moeten voorbereiden om hernieuwde onrust aan onze grenzen het hoofd te bieden.” (bron)

“If we are not willing to slow down our own energy transition we will have to make preparations for military action to quell renewed unrest at our borders”

This as we said is a threat to our adress by the financial/fossil sector. One we should not accept.

In the category swords to ploughshares

I can has me some contour trenches! EEhaw!

Just for the typical pro fossil crazy who likes a big explosion or burning stuff, this may be your go-to geoengineering solution. It involves airplains and high explosives. Cluster bombing of land that no is dry and barren. It’s just a thought but be sure this will come to pass before the decade is over..

We have written about countour trenching, a technique used and promoted by Peter Westerveld. It is a way to shape flat landscape so it absorbs more rainwater. Simply said land that is very dry often also looses out on rainwater because when it rains there is a sudden flood that instead of permeate the ground flushes over it, even washes away the topsoil. The hardened top layer doesn’t allow water in so this chance for life to grow passes and drought returns for the rest of the time.

To break this cycle of lost opportunities the top layer must be shaped, by digging trenches perpendicular to the direction of the rainfloods. When this is done, the floods will fill the trenches, sink into the ground and form a reservoir that can feed plants when there is no rain. It can even form underground rivers feeding into cool lakes and wells that spring year round. All this is exactly what plants need. Natural processes by itself make gullies, not perpendicular trenches.

It is only a small step then to think “How can we make trenches fast in remote regions” The answer can be to send out robot diggers running on solar energy. Drone diggers can dig for years on end, being maintained by few people or maybe even other automated systems. This robotic approach is appealing but can be considered time consuming. We believe such systems will be created and used for this purpose.

Another is a bit more fun for the BBQ loving redneck in us (or the US) : Bomb the ground to create trenches. This can require precision bombs or special devices that can be dropped above a field that will hit the ground and explode to form a long trench in the landscape.

Its clear that this creates a nice task for people that like quick solutions to problems, preferably one which involves blasting things. Who now dry and empty regions can be treated by smart trench forming bombs that elegantly land along the isoclines to blast and form the ground into a water absorbing life generating shape. It is a technical challenge fit for the engineers used to making lethal devices, even the possible planting of trees by cluserbombing the now water carrying land later.

Another good example of how contour trenches can change the water dynamics, out of india

Isreal is also taking action in the Negev Desert, greening it. It can do much more..

Making sure the water remains close to the tree and in the ground also helps a lot

Dutch : Scientists, Big Data Needs a Counterforce

Privacy and Eugenics, how Big Data opens the door to unnatural selection

At the start of the second world war some people in Amsterdam realized that the Nazi’s that would prosecute the jews in Holland, would find it very easy to locate them using the city register. So the resistance decided to torch the archive located in Artis.

Records on 70.000 jews in Amsterdam partially destroyed by freedom fighters..

This act, which was only partially succesfull, illustrates a risk in information gathered on people. We have written here before about the eugenic aspect of big data gathering. The most important point is that there are people who want to improve the genepool by causing deaths, and those that want to do so by preventing lives. The first want to restrict medical care to unsuccesfull people, keep them poor and use them to sell stuff to that is harmfull (like drugs, sigarets, fatty food etc.) The latter wants to educate all individuals equally, hoping that this will cause women to control their lives better, reducing childbirths (as is seen in developed countries) and increasing overal population health and prosperity. We belong to this last group.

FBI scans 430,000 irises

As we can see in the US at the moment, ignorance, years of undermining education and bad influence projected by the republicans is now resulting in a voter population that will allow itself to be lied to and swayed by the weakest and most infantile of arguments and individuals, Donald Trump. He banks on the golden rule of “Catch me if you can” : People only know what you tell them.

Now as we can see Donald is not mild against his opponents, and as we can see many dictators in the history of the western world have used every means available to find and disable opponents, how can we allow there to be databases which can assist in our definitive identification as individuals. We may be the suppressed majority, as was the case in Chile, Russia under stalin and communism, East Germany, Zimbabwe, Egypt to a large extent, etc. etc. etc. The examples are endless.

Many leaders wish or have to be tirants, and hard biometric data enables them

Even in Holland, where one can feel pretty safe, the close ties of the right political groups with the US, their weakness when it comes to datasharing and privacy (as opposed to Germany and Russia that do not want alien control over data and privacy information), means that even here one can not be certain to be safe from the abuse of information by unofficial or covert groups. This is the paranoid, but completely vindicated view of what goes on in the world. As long as everybody is happy there is no risk, but come trouble the attitude of some may change, and then the data is there.

Hard and Soft Biometrics

If you photograph an iris, that counts as a hard biometric datapoint. Companies like Citylens do that. Do they share that data? Will they be used as a data source in the future? Fingerprints are another example. You can barely remove them. A lot of other aspects of our person can be recorded that be used at any time to make an exact determination on who we are dealing with. This kind of biometrics should always remain in the hands of the individual, never in the hands of a government. This should be the goal. The biometric data held by the individual in a passport or should be tied to a number in the government systems, and that number should be the only way to identify the individual. Maybe additional data can be revealed if the individual shares a password.

Disappeared opponents under Pinochet..

The above scheme would constitute a soft biometric system can not be abused by a rogue government, because the individual will destroy his document and the id number does not reveal any aspect of his person. This way the cooperation with the government remains voluntary, which it is assumed to be, after all, people vote for it, or against it. That choice would be denied if the government could force itself on the individual, even when none of the voters agrees with its actions any longer.

Diamonds

An example of soft biometrics is a now existing blockchain database of diamonds in trade. It is created to protect the diamond business against the growing number of artificially grown diamonds, which are hard to tell apart from real ones. The system stores the id of the diamonds using an american system of characterization. The aspects of the diamond itself are translated to a number, a code, known by the US agency. This means that if all the data of that agency is destroyed the meaning of the number is lost and diamonds can no longer be identified or given their provenance. To inject artificial diamonds in the world trade one would have to do that. But what if there was a way to characterize a diamond in a number that would always work, be easily repeated (like taking a picture of an iris). That number stored in a distributed data system like a blockchain would mean that the diamonds in it would always be found, artificial diamonds either excluded or injected as the keepers of these records saw fit. Total control over the world market for ever. That is the risk of hard biometrics.

Adaptability

We see companies form and fail constantly, and this is a normal thing in the economy, but what about governments? They should form and fail as the situation changes. Brexit shows that conservatives needed a shakeup, UKIP ran its course, Boris Johnson had to leave and give Gove an excuse to fail and leave. This type of flexibility may not serve the public, but is necessary for governments to respond to reality. Similarly voting citizen have to be allowed to move and change their minds. This means it has to be impossible to coerce them unless they clearly break the law or intent to. If you have all their biometric data you can coerce them outside the public eye, and if you are a Nazi or Stasi government you will simply find them and put them in some camp to rot, thus terrorizing the population into compliance with (in the case of Hitler) the hatefull and destructive nightmare of one individual.

The fossil banking system is the only one with an interest in hard biometrics

A government is a system we choose to comply with, not a system that has our compliance or can force it. The only reason why you could find a government like that is that it is clear there are solutions to every problem. And this is the case if one uses fossil fuels. Even in the US, up until recently it was clear that all the corruption, all the supression of renewables, all the denial of climate change, was to make sure banks and oil companies could continue their businesses unhindered. It is them who drive the terror threat, it is them who created ISIS and Al Quaida, it is them who thrive of arms trade and who create Homeland Security, it is them who funded the NSA and will work to have a indestructable database with hard biometrics on all of us.

A renewables powered world is local, doesn’t need a global spying and controlling government

A renewable powered world will not have banks like we have now, it will not need global cooperation because it will not create needyness by separating consumers and producers. It will not need to have a ‘growing economy’, it will have local governments that won’t have to know how to identify each citizen exactly. It will not be as competitive because we now compete over access to fossil fuels. Renewables are 2500 times more abundant, we will have more than enough to surivive and restore our planet. But if we don’t protect ourselves against the possibility of a government weeding out whoever wants to end the fossil reign, which has been show to happen (fossil fuel companies paying private armies and individuals to infiltrate opposition, trying to bring them to criminal acts so they can be prosecuted) we may not be able to until fossil fuels have truely destroyed life on our planet.

Rule : Identification of an indivial must remain voluntary at all times. This means hard biometric data should not be allowed in the hands of anyone

Iris biometrics may be usable for identifying the dead

Siemens made a breakthrough in low weight electro motor design, they published a press release on their 260 kW electro motor of only 50 Kg, which is 5 times lighter than was possible up to now. They equiped a small stunt plane with the motor and it flew near silent.

From the press release :

• Technical milestone: maiden flight of an electric aircraft with a 260-kilowatt power output
• Siemens motor powers Extra 330LE aerobatic airplane in near silence
• Technology to be integrated into development of hybrid-electric aircraft in cooperation with Airbus

This is the second electric plane, that looks a lot like a regular one. Airbus developed one, but Airbus is not an electro motor design company like Siemens. Of course lighter motors will also make EVs more cost effective, so Siemens is tapping a vast and expanding market.

Airbus e-fan

Imagine that your airport makes next to no noise, and you have no smog at all (also no toxic chemicals that are used to prevent moldin the fuel tanks). This would immediately increase the value of property around airports. If Siemens finds a way to make practical sizes motors for passenger Airbusses, it will be clear that this has huge advantages. The main obstacle seems to be battery weight.

” Electric drives are scalable, and Siemens and Airbus will be using the record-setting motor as a basis for developing regional airliners powered by hybrid-electric propulsion systems. “By 2030, we expect to see initial aircraft with up to 100 passengers and a range of around 1,000 kilometers,” 

Less noise, less maintenance, more power.. (more pictures here)

Its an water/air cooled brushless electromotor with three coils.

“The RX1E can fly 120km/h after just 90 minutes of charging, but will the first electric plane approved for commercial use really take off?” (source source)

AI and robotics are presented as threats to the workforce. We are told we have to compete with them, but we have been competing with machines for more than a century now : Machines in factories running on fossil fuel or fossil derived electricity. AI, automation just has gotten more easy to achieve, more liquid, pervasive, and this (in our humble opinion) spells chaos.

Cyber crime becomes the biggest form of crime in the UK

Already we are facing a situation in which we really can’t trust the media anymore. The ability to create artificial images and video of real world individuals has advanced to the point that making a video in which Elvis sings a duet with Lady Gaga is peanuts. What if we apply that technology to newscasts, to video of well known politicians. As that technology exists, and we wrote about it here what media can you trust?

AI and robots are not like workers, they don’t sit at home watch footbal on tv in the evening or go have a beer. These things are tools, like hammers, nails. And they are tools for whomever picks them up. They find uses with those that want to advance the economy, and with those that want to steal from it. They will find use with people that want to run a decent society and those that would welcome the return of human slavery. So there is a real serious risk. Summing up the possibilities would give people ideas. We are thinking of building a system that will demonstrate what we mean, but in short AI’s and Robots can do the job of assholes and criminals without us being able to punish them.

Example : Police robot blowing up assailant. In the news is a case of a bomb squad robot detonating a charge that kills a suspect. Not only is this risk free for the police, it is a cruel method of execution, and a kill without proper cause in our book. Ok, the sniper killed 5 police officers, but gas would have worked as well. The officer that decided to use the robot said he would do it again. How far are we from roaming flying drones with machine guns shooting random people while the rest of us assumes they had it coming just because we have no means to resist or protest for real?

Source. What do you think robotics and AI will mean to this criminal demographic?

We have hesitated to write about this for some time, but now we think the examples are mounting, like the online world has a large criminal hacker community, the offline world will develop an AI/Drone/Robotics based criminal hacker scene that is very hard to combat if you don’t remove the technology. The opposite has happened. We can think of many ways this can go the wrong way, and we are sure police and the justice system are not prepared for what is possible. This will all add to a chaos we can not use right now, we need the opposite, calm, controlled environment, not polluted (like where this blog is written), not corrupted, to execute a transition to renewable energy sources that can bring peace and prosperity instead of the growing desperation under a shrinking fossil ration..

This computer powers itself by radio waves, so it can work without intervention for decades..