George Monbiot in the Guardian sounding off again about the necessity of nuclear power.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/mar/31/double-standards-nuclear
My response this time:
So, you're making bets with human lives for the next ten thousand years, at least. Less than one hundred years of 100 centuries have passed, and we've already seen the Bomb in action, jerry-built first generation plants, nuclear waste in the US and the USSR gone AWOL, "accidents" like Sellafield, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Ten thousand years. The final solution to waste management hasn't been solved. The history of (literate) human civilization only covers five thousand years. One or two epochs of chaos and barbarianism and we'll see Nuclear Fission generating a Final Solution for humanity - that's all of us, now and ever after.
Big Oil, and Big Coal don't threaten civilization as such. And over a perspective of ten thousand years!!
You, George, are gearing up for a really plush job as a shill for Big Nuke.
Your cred has been washed away with the toxic spill water in Fukushima they can't find storage for. And the toxicity shredding your cred will accumulate (it accumulates, remember?) over the next, oh, ten years or so, at the very least, according to Big Nuke fans. That's what they're saying about the situation as it is NOW. But this "accident" looks to non-Nuke fans very much like the beginning of a catastrophe, not the end.
Two developments will solve our energy problems in the next couple of decades.
One is certain - renewable fuels and improved efficiency.
The other still sounds hypothetical and speculative to most people, but I can assure you it isn't. It's a successful mobilization of the massed working classes and peasants of dozens of countries around the world to put an end to capitalism and its dictatorship (when did the bourgeoisie ever permit the diversity of a competitive alternative non-capitalist workers state to show its paces?)
After that Big Nuke (and yourself as Little Nuke) will be as relevant as the people who used to think the sun circled the earth.
31 March 2011
29 March 2011
Emergency regimes in the imperialist heartlands
George Monbiot writes indignantly in the Guardian about illiberal and repressive legislation in Britain, and the tightening of the screws since Thatcher.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/free-protest-clegg-oh-dear?
A commentator indicated that what's good for the goose should be good for the gander. I quoted him and added my own comment:
Well, anything and everything they do to protect their economic, social and state interests is fine, even if they have to set aside constitutional rights and freedoms in the process. We've seen this in the emergency dictatorial regimes used to protect a bourgeois capitalist state in Italy (Mussolini), Germany (Hitler), Spain (Franco), Chile (Pinochet), etc, etc (just riffle through the diplomatic history of the US, Britain and France for a more complete list. If the threat from the working class and its mass of poor allies isn't quite as immediate, but still acute, you get permanent regimes of emergency mostly military goons (as in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia etc) protecting the capitalist system. A bit less acute and a bit more constrained by the deadlock between the classes underlying classical bourgeois democracy and you get what we see in eg the US Britain and France. Sometimes desperate concessions (as in the postwar Welfare States and their equivalents) and sometimes (when the bourgeoisie feels it's got us on the ground) a good kicking and a lot of harrassment (the Thatcher/Reagan/neo-lib-con era).
If we did the same to them, their choir of media angels would stop singing hosanna in the highest and start belting out a doom-laden dies irae. We'd hear no end of the evil being done to Freedom, Democracy, Justice, National Glory, the Economy, and Joe down the Pub.
If we managed to exorcise capitalist economic insanity and set up a workers state or two, they would protect their interests (ill-gotten gains) by all measures necessary, in the name of National Glory, the Economy and Joe down the Pub, and in flagrant disregard of Freedom, Democracy and Justice. (Using Joe down the Pub to do their dirty work, of course.)
In all these instances they are evidently operating a dictatorship in the interests of the bourgeois class, all the while screaming that a corresponding dictatorship in the interests of the working class is totally indefensible, has no right to exist and must be exterminated.
Over the past couple of decades it has become obvious that Classes are still with us, and that they are still engaged in Class War. Obvious but unacknowledged, and unmentionable in respectable public discourse (eg the Beeb and the Guardian). George M and others describe the symptoms, but refuse to diagnose the cause, even less the cure. But until the cause is diagnosed and publicly acknowledged, and until there is a massive public debate on the best cure, then the symptoms will just get worse and worse.
The New Deal and the Welfare State were just desperate palliative measures (morphine to keep a dying system from feeling the agony). As soon as the worst fever abated, the mercy measures were withdrawn, and the system was back on the street as its old rapacious self, hungrier and more ruthless than ever.
And if anyone can imagine a new dispensation of Welfare State palliatives being prescribed today, in the first place they're out of their minds, and in the second place, if the inconceivable should happen, it would all be rolled back again in a few decades, for ever and ever.
So, would you rather be a naive non-combatant torn limb from limb by Freedom and Democracy Peace-Builders, or would you prefer to bite the bullet and defend yourself and yours and your own interests - the interests that are shared by everyone in the world except the rich and powerful few and their mercenary thugs and parasites?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/28/free-protest-clegg-oh-dear?
A commentator indicated that what's good for the goose should be good for the gander. I quoted him and added my own comment:
TheGreatRonRafferty
28 March 2011 9:05PM
On the BBC earlier tonight - the announcement that hooligans wearing face coverings would be banned from demonstrations. On screen at exactly the same time - a line of police officers ....... with face coverings.
You couldn't make this stuff up!
Well, anything and everything they do to protect their economic, social and state interests is fine, even if they have to set aside constitutional rights and freedoms in the process. We've seen this in the emergency dictatorial regimes used to protect a bourgeois capitalist state in Italy (Mussolini), Germany (Hitler), Spain (Franco), Chile (Pinochet), etc, etc (just riffle through the diplomatic history of the US, Britain and France for a more complete list. If the threat from the working class and its mass of poor allies isn't quite as immediate, but still acute, you get permanent regimes of emergency mostly military goons (as in North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia etc) protecting the capitalist system. A bit less acute and a bit more constrained by the deadlock between the classes underlying classical bourgeois democracy and you get what we see in eg the US Britain and France. Sometimes desperate concessions (as in the postwar Welfare States and their equivalents) and sometimes (when the bourgeoisie feels it's got us on the ground) a good kicking and a lot of harrassment (the Thatcher/Reagan/neo-lib-con era).
If we did the same to them, their choir of media angels would stop singing hosanna in the highest and start belting out a doom-laden dies irae. We'd hear no end of the evil being done to Freedom, Democracy, Justice, National Glory, the Economy, and Joe down the Pub.
If we managed to exorcise capitalist economic insanity and set up a workers state or two, they would protect their interests (ill-gotten gains) by all measures necessary, in the name of National Glory, the Economy and Joe down the Pub, and in flagrant disregard of Freedom, Democracy and Justice. (Using Joe down the Pub to do their dirty work, of course.)
In all these instances they are evidently operating a dictatorship in the interests of the bourgeois class, all the while screaming that a corresponding dictatorship in the interests of the working class is totally indefensible, has no right to exist and must be exterminated.
Over the past couple of decades it has become obvious that Classes are still with us, and that they are still engaged in Class War. Obvious but unacknowledged, and unmentionable in respectable public discourse (eg the Beeb and the Guardian). George M and others describe the symptoms, but refuse to diagnose the cause, even less the cure. But until the cause is diagnosed and publicly acknowledged, and until there is a massive public debate on the best cure, then the symptoms will just get worse and worse.
The New Deal and the Welfare State were just desperate palliative measures (morphine to keep a dying system from feeling the agony). As soon as the worst fever abated, the mercy measures were withdrawn, and the system was back on the street as its old rapacious self, hungrier and more ruthless than ever.
And if anyone can imagine a new dispensation of Welfare State palliatives being prescribed today, in the first place they're out of their minds, and in the second place, if the inconceivable should happen, it would all be rolled back again in a few decades, for ever and ever.
So, would you rather be a naive non-combatant torn limb from limb by Freedom and Democracy Peace-Builders, or would you prefer to bite the bullet and defend yourself and yours and your own interests - the interests that are shared by everyone in the world except the rich and powerful few and their mercenary thugs and parasites?
22 March 2011
Energy Effluent
Same energy bollocks as the last blog took up. This time it's George Monbiot in the Guardian who's condemning us to millennia of fear, uncertainty and doubt:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima?
I commented:
So much for Monbiot's progressive credentials (I won't bother with "left" or "socialist").
I'm sure he's gone through the litany a thousand times... Sellafield, Chernobyl, Murmansk...
And all the US and Soviet weapons and plutonium that's been misplaced and is unaccounted for, and the fact that 100,000 years is a geological time scale, and that Sod's Law rules...
If Monby thinks that the Japanese run "crappy old plants" then god knows how he'd describe what they have in other less "timid" countries. How about some jerry-built breeder on an earthquake fault in some jerry-built nation? (err, China? the Balkans?) Volcanoes? Asteroids? Nuclear bombing (err, Israel finally loses it and bombs Iran).
There's any amount of depleted uranium just lying around in Iraq...
Final deposition? Not even "crappy old" Sweden has found the answer, let alone errr Sellafield.
In fact Monby's lost it... put all the money, scientific research, propaganda and international cooperation into renewables that's been wasted on nukes and you'd have an alternative up and running in a decade. Solar in North Africa, China, India and Australia coupled with High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines coupled with advanced storage capabilities we haven't got an inkling of yet (think video over the internet on mobiles just ten or fifteen years ago). And that's just solar.
M is either headline-hungry, money-hungry or power-hungry - we'll see which in the next few years. A Christopher Hitchins of Big Nuke.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/21/pro-nuclear-japan-fukushima?
I commented:
So much for Monbiot's progressive credentials (I won't bother with "left" or "socialist").
I'm sure he's gone through the litany a thousand times... Sellafield, Chernobyl, Murmansk...
And all the US and Soviet weapons and plutonium that's been misplaced and is unaccounted for, and the fact that 100,000 years is a geological time scale, and that Sod's Law rules...
If Monby thinks that the Japanese run "crappy old plants" then god knows how he'd describe what they have in other less "timid" countries. How about some jerry-built breeder on an earthquake fault in some jerry-built nation? (err, China? the Balkans?) Volcanoes? Asteroids? Nuclear bombing (err, Israel finally loses it and bombs Iran).
There's any amount of depleted uranium just lying around in Iraq...
Final deposition? Not even "crappy old" Sweden has found the answer, let alone errr Sellafield.
In fact Monby's lost it... put all the money, scientific research, propaganda and international cooperation into renewables that's been wasted on nukes and you'd have an alternative up and running in a decade. Solar in North Africa, China, India and Australia coupled with High Voltage Direct Current transmission lines coupled with advanced storage capabilities we haven't got an inkling of yet (think video over the internet on mobiles just ten or fifteen years ago). And that's just solar.
M is either headline-hungry, money-hungry or power-hungry - we'll see which in the next few years. A Christopher Hitchins of Big Nuke.
16 March 2011
On energy policy
An exchange on a discussion list degenerated into a jeremiad about having no choice except Coal, Oil or Nuclear, whether we like it or not.
I objected, as follows:
I objected, as follows:
Fossil fuels are deadly in many different ways. So are nukes.
We don't have to accept either. The alternatives are feasible, and in aggregate more than sufficient. They can (and now *will*) be developed as rapidly as nukes were during ww2 and the Cold War - money is no object when you really really want something.
Oil is shite, coal is shite, nuclear fission is shite.
Water is good (rivers, waves, tides), air is good (wind, a/c heat exchangers), earth is good (geothermal heat exchange and extraction), and fire is good (geothermal steam and direct heating in volcanic areas). Insulation and passive heating is good. Sun is good (passive heating of water and buildings, solar film, solar concentration plants).
Storage and battery technologies will soon be up to the task of evening out supply and demand, and large scale provision of power by utilities will be smoothly linked with small-scale local production, and transmission technologies will even out geographical disadvantages (High Voltage Direct Current).
There will be immense economies of energy by way of local production of power, food, etc - rooftop solar collectors, wind-turbines and gardens. Every stream will be able to produce electric power for local use.
Nuclear fusion and extraction of electricity from the environment (Tesla lives!) are good, but a few decades from use on a mass scale.
There's no point whatever in us lobotomizing ourselves to put ourselves in the position of today's rulers and fuel/power profiteers. We don't have to pretend it's a choice between Death by coal, death by oil, or death by radiation.
Their "realism" is reptilian self-interest trumpeted as the General Good by corrupt media, prostituted expertise, and worshippers of the Established Fact tm.
Our realism is removing these bastards from power and setting in motion an international drive to realize the potential I've sketched above on a scale a thousand times greater than the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan or the Race to the Moon.
Their approach reduces human beings to passive victims, ours magnifies them into active makers and doers.
5 March 2011
Some elementary points about getting to socialism
In a discussion on Facebook, AM wrote:
"For real socialism, look at Germany, plus the Scandinavian nations. Free elections, trade unions are respected, health care for life for all citizens, & free enterprise to make the money that makes all the above possible. China is headed in this direction, I think. Do you really want to go back to the USSR, with no money & a five-year wait for an apartment or a Trabant (car)?"and"... there are better, successful models of socialism than the old Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist one. I wish the workers of Bangladesh success in preserving trade unions!"
I responded:
AM, you can forget Scandinavia as a model of Socialism. The idiots running the crippled remains of ex-Warsaw Pact countries like Czecho/Slovakia after the so-called Velvet Revolutions had all kinds of crazy ideas about Third Way socialism based on eg Sweden. Fat lot of good it did them. Not much left of the Welfare State these days. Both Conservative and Social Democrat governments have been rolling and racheting back all the postwar gains of the workers. Education, health, pensions, workers rights, public services of all kinds all going down the drain while the "country" ie the rich just gets richer and richer.
And there's nothing odd or remarkable about it - workers get better conditions when they threaten to boot out capitalists for ever. As soon as the capitalists feel less threatened they force worse conditions on us as soon as they can.
And as Mike said, Mao and Stalin and their bureaucratic regimes have as little to do with Marx and Lenin as Hitler and Mussolini - with the exception that Mao and Stalin used Marx and Lenin as masks to fool the workers. They had to do that cos their privileges were sucked from the blood of a non-capitalist state, a workers state. Bureaucratic regimes always try to turn themselves into real hereditary bourgeois, though, rather than let the workers take power democratically. In the USSR they went the whole hog and handed over the state to capitalism. The Chinese haven't got there yet (what's the point? They're doing fine as it is,and what on earth has imperialism got to offer them that they can't fix better themselves?)
If the imperialists don't destroy the world, real socialism will come, don't worry about that. What we don't know is where or when. What we do know is that the start will be a bloody mess following the battle to oust the capitalists - they'll go far less quietly than Gaddafi - and that when things settle down they won't look ANYTHING AT ALL like the Stalinist USSR or Red China.
Almost immediately AM responded with this friendly post:
Nope. But more on that another time.
Think modern bourgeois democracy before the English Revolution of 1640-60. There were no countries then anyone could point to that came close to that ideal. Yet after two centuries all the advanced countries were bourgeois democracies.
The thing is that socialism will be a worldwide system improving on the highest levels of production and quality reached by capitalism, and it will be run on the basis of workers democracy and universal cooperation and planning. We'll get there, but there's a lot of spade work to be done before we do.
And there's nothing odd or remarkable about it - workers get better conditions when they threaten to boot out capitalists for ever. As soon as the capitalists feel less threatened they force worse conditions on us as soon as they can.
And as Mike said, Mao and Stalin and their bureaucratic regimes have as little to do with Marx and Lenin as Hitler and Mussolini - with the exception that Mao and Stalin used Marx and Lenin as masks to fool the workers. They had to do that cos their privileges were sucked from the blood of a non-capitalist state, a workers state. Bureaucratic regimes always try to turn themselves into real hereditary bourgeois, though, rather than let the workers take power democratically. In the USSR they went the whole hog and handed over the state to capitalism. The Chinese haven't got there yet (what's the point? They're doing fine as it is,and what on earth has imperialism got to offer them that they can't fix better themselves?)
If the imperialists don't destroy the world, real socialism will come, don't worry about that. What we don't know is where or when. What we do know is that the start will be a bloody mess following the battle to oust the capitalists - they'll go far less quietly than Gaddafi - and that when things settle down they won't look ANYTHING AT ALL like the Stalinist USSR or Red China.
Almost immediately AM responded with this friendly post:
" @ Choppa: best explanation I've heard yet! Thanks. Is there any country today that comes close to your ideal? Just curious."and I replied:
Nope. But more on that another time.
Think modern bourgeois democracy before the English Revolution of 1640-60. There were no countries then anyone could point to that came close to that ideal. Yet after two centuries all the advanced countries were bourgeois democracies.
The thing is that socialism will be a worldwide system improving on the highest levels of production and quality reached by capitalism, and it will be run on the basis of workers democracy and universal cooperation and planning. We'll get there, but there's a lot of spade work to be done before we do.
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