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The low carbon idea is a frivolous fashion, but could airships take some freight from container ships? Seems unlikely but there are visions here of giant caravans of airships lifting into jetstreams and travelling perpetually eastwards. And there are already models competing for start up funds. Airships use a lot less fuel than jets do, but a lot more helium, which is a point that gets a mention, but not much of an answer. How airships could provide the future of green transportAmbrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph A Boeing 747 requires at least 70 tonnes of aviation fuel to cross the Atlantic. Mr Handley says his ARH 50 model has the same cargo payload but needs just five tonnes of fuel for the same journey, yet can still reach 300 km/h at high altitude. Airships can land anywhere there is a flat space — they don’t need the runways and airports. They can get closer to their destination. Even landing on a river. An academic paper from the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis In Austria proposes using the Jet Stream to transport cargo on transcontinental routes without any need for power beyond the initial lift and descent. The cargo ships would float on high winds above 40,000 feet at an average speed of 160 km/h, displacing fleets of container shipping at sea. The study claims that they would cut fuel use by 96pc. The circular flow would always be from West to East – Shanghai to Los Angeles, New York to London, or Frankfurt to Mumbai – rotating in a perennial circuit. It would take eight days to cross half the world by the northern Jet Stream, and seven days by the southern route, beating maritime shipping on time as well as emissions. These unmanned super-Hindenburgs controlled by artificial intelligence could be over a mile long, spectral airships passing far overhead in caravans along regulated bands near the troposphere, emitting no sound or CO2. Is there enough helium in the world to sustain a big airship industry? We know a low carbon fantasy (with subsidies) can support an uncompetitive industry for a long time. But do airships make sense without the subsidy? Some Australian researchers visiting China turned out to be effectively Chinese researchers funded by Australians.What does it mean to be an Australian citizen paid by Australian taxpayers if it’s “OK” to take $150,000 extra from the CCP, plus benefits for the wife and kids, and in some cases also keep that a secret from the Uni in Australia that they work for? How about having a cloned research project in China studying the same high tech topics and producing patents owned by the Chinese government? The “Thousand Talents Plan” has been described by FBI director Christopher Wray as “economic espionage”. It includes military technology, drone automation, AI, biotech, and many high tech areas. To put a fine point on it, some of these researchers are signing up to agreements to obey Chinese laws, and which require them to ask permission from the CCP before they disclose these arrangements to their Australian employers. We might be tempted to call this all sort of names, but this sort of activity is apparently legal. It’s just a loophole being exploited. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s new report: Hunting the phoenix: The Chinese Communist Party’s search for technology and talent. Remember Peter Ridd can be sacked for being uncollegial, but it appears that academics who may undermine national interests and give away intellectual property are acting within the law. Where were the Vice Chancellors? What were they thinking: Employment contracts stop Australian professors from speaking freely in Australia, but allow them to serve the CCP at our expense? Looks like one civilization is fast asleep at the wheel. Some things matter: China exploits Australia’s lax laws to sign up researchers for secretive programSharri Markson, and Kylar Louisikian, The Australian The Chinese government is actively recruiting leading Australian scientists for a secretive research program that offers lucrative salaries and perks but requires their inventions to be patented in China and obliges them to abide by Chinese law. The Australian’s investigation has exposed that universities do not know: how many Thousand Talents Plan recipients are in their employ; if their academics are lodging patents in China; and whether their academics are being paid second salaries by affiliated Chinese universities. Thank goodness for The Australian newspaper which has a large feature story today. Where was Our ABC?Andrew Hastie M.P. has called for an “urgent” inquiry into the Thousand Talents Plan. The Australian’s summary:
It works out pretty well for interested researchers: Professor Yu specialises in drone automation and artificial intelligence, and has been working on an area of intense interest to the Chinese government: aerial warfare and co-ordinating thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles to co-operate in the air. Chinese-language reports state he is part of Chinese government recruitment programs including the Qianjiang Scholar of Zhejiang Provincial Talents program and the Taishan Scholars Project, Shandong Province. Despite being on full-time pay at Curtin [in Western Australia], where he receives a 60 per cent loading on a professor’s salary and his research institute has been funded to the tune of $4m, The Australian understands he has spent most of the year in China. After The Australian contacted him and Curtin University, Professor Yu’s Hangzhou Dianzi profile became unavailable for public view. Curtin declined to answer specific questions about him, despite issuing a press release with great fanfare when it appointed him to the role of Optus Chair of Artificial Intelligence in May last year. … Some in the US woke up to this late last year:Jenny Leonard, Bloomberg, Dec 2019 Officials are concerned about spying and intellectual-property theft. U.S. officials say TTP encourages economic espionage and theft of intellectual property, the issue at the heart of President Trump’s trade war with China. Was any of this a secret? Hardly. Until last September, China published the names of recruits on an official website. That all ended when a Chinese American engineer (and TTP participant) working for General Electric Co. was arrested for allegedly stealing tech secrets from the company. That’s a lot of patent applications:  Patent applications from China and the US. : Bloomberg
The CCP have been recruiting scientists all over the world:Ben Packham in The Australian Chinese Communist Party uses ‘talent stations’ to lure scientists: reportThe Chinese Communist Party has at least 57 talent recruitment “stations” in Australia to lure the top scientists to work for Beijing on Xi Jinping’s goal of global dominance in critical technologies, a new report says. The ASPI report says an estimated 1000 Australian scientists are believed to have been recruited to participate in its overseas talent plans, with many working on technologies that can be harnessed by the Chinese military. China’s talent program recruiters are paid up to $40,000 for each scientist they recruit, plus annual operating costs, the report by China analyst Alex Joske says. They are part of a web of more than 600 such stations located in technologically advanced countries. In the highest profile example of alleged misconduct by a Chinese talent plan scientist, Harvard Professor Charles Lieber, a nanotechnologist with no Chinese heritage, was arrested earlier this year for allegedly failing to disclose a US$50,000 monthly salary from a Chinese university. Notably, China doesn’t want to adopt many of our climate scientists, I can’t think why. But there are several that are claimed to be involved. For example, Wenju Cai at CSIRO is named in many Chinese sites as being a part of the Thousand Talents Plan, though the CSIRO says this is not true. He works at CSIRO in Climate and marine science, and officially also at the Qingdao National Marine Laboratory in China. That lab has 3,000 researchers and some of them are involved in satellite mounted laser detection of submarines at depths of 500m. Professor Cai admits to being a part of the Aoshan Talent program, a different Chinese program which The Australian tells us can pay up to $200,000 a year with research funds of up to $1m, and includes help for some to buy a house if they sign up for the 6 year plan. The Australian does not specifically claim any benefits in Professor Cai’s case. There is also Huijun Zhao, Griffith University, director of the Centre for Clean Environment and Energy, which researches chemical and microbiological approaches to pollution. The Australian only says he receives a daily allowance for expenses when he is in China. Also Dai Liming University of NSW, a specialist in carbon based, metalfree renewable energy technology. Professor Andrew McMinn, Uni of Tas, who is a researcher of sea ice ecology and environmental change. His university knew about it. How about Professor Zhaoyang (Joe) Dong, University of NSW, who is a specialist in power system planning and stability and is director of the UNSW Digital Grid Futures Institute. Professor Dong heads one of Australia’s largest energy research projects — the ARC Hub for Integrated Energy Storage. “As a consultant he also leads the development of the load models for Western Power Corporations daily usage in operations and planning of Western Australia;s transmission network. He further leads the gas and electricity network co-planning for the $12.6m CSIRO Future Grid Project.” Then there is Professor Guoxiu Wang at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) who denies being a Thousand Talent recruit. He specialises in energy storage and batteries. UTS says that China is loosely referring to him being in the Thousand Talents program and it is merely a mark of respect, not that he is part of the official program. The Australian discovered his name was on 11 patent applications, but Professor Dong says he had no knowledge of 10 of those applications. He has asked for his name to be taken off them. If there are weaknesses and vulnerabilities in Australian energy grids, China is possibly very well informed of them, and if we did discover an efficient battery we might end up buying them from China and paying for the royalties on their discovery too. * * * Commenters please note: “The Australian is not suggesting the academics have acted inappropriately.” That goes for Jo Nova too, and I ask commenters to refrain from suggesting this behaviour is illegal. It may be unethical, unAustralian, shortsighted, naive and selfish, but it is not illegal. More fool us. There are plenty of targets to blame for enabling this behaviour and allowing this to go on for years. Solar Power, not-so-sustainable?Solar panels need a special kind of recycling that costs 4 to 8 times as much as the recycled bits and bobs are worth. And the first major generation of solar panels will hit their use-by date soon. Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash Maddie Stone, Wired By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency projects that up to 78 million metric tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life, and that the world will be generating about 6 million metric tons of new solar e-waste annually. While the latter number is a small fraction of the total e-waste humanity produces each year, standard electronics recycling methods don’t cut it for solar panels. Recovering the most valuable materials from one, including silver and silicon, requires bespoke recycling solutions. The solar sleeper awakes:Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years, and the world didn’t start deploying solar widely until the early 2000s. As a result, a fairly small number of panels are being decommissioned today. PV Cycle, a nonprofit dedicated to solar panel take-back and recycling, collects several thousand tons of solar e-waste across the European Union each year… In the EU the producers have to recycle the panels they make. Rules to deal with solar remnants are apparently in progress in Australia, India and Japan, but there are almost none in the USA. At a typical e-waste facility, this high-tech sandwich will be treated crudely. Recyclers often take off the panel’s frame and its junction box to recover the aluminum and copper, then shred the rest of the module, including the glass, polymers, and silicon cells, which get coated in a silver electrode and soldered using tin and lead. (Because the vast majority of that mixture by weight is glass, the resultant product is considered an impure, crushed glass.) Tao and his colleagues estimate that a recycler taking apart a standard 60-cell silicon panel can get about $3 for the recovered aluminum, copper, and glass. Vanderhoof, meanwhile, says that the cost of recycling that panel in the US is between $12 and $25—after transportation costs, which “oftentimes equal the cost to recycle.” At the same time, in states that allow it, it typically costs less than a dollar to dump a solar panel in a solid-waste landfill. Second-hand solar panels are being sent to the third world. Makes a cheaper form of landfill… h/t Enoch R August 24th, 2020 | Tags: Renewable Energy, Solar Energy (PV) | Category: Global Warming, Renewable, Solar Power |  Print This Post | | A satirical take on the media.
How to Sell Protest Footage to FOX AND CNN, by Ryan Long. So there’s still a bias, but if he’d used a sledgehammer CNN fans wouldn’t be laughing too, and they need to see this more than Fox fans do. …. It’s really quite a scandal.  Missing out on the Sunshine Vitamin? Historians will marvel that societies that were advanced enough to stream reality-tv-shows at 100 million bits per second, were also so backwards that half the population was deficient in Vitamin D — something that costs 6 cents a dose or comes free from the sun. Nearly 60% of older Germans were deficient, and the ESTHER study puts a fine point on how much that matters. Almost 10,000 people were followed for 15 years in Germany, and during that time about half the people who died of respiratory illnesses might not have died if they had enough Vitamin D. In this German study 44% did not have adequate Vitamin D and about 1 in 6 people have levels so low they are clinically deficient. Imagine if someone found a drug that stopped nearly half of all influenza deaths? Right now, the Northern Hemisphere has higher levels of Vitamin D than most months which is quite likely reducing the death rates. The message needs to get out about Vitamin D before the next Northern Winter.
 Morethan half the population is deficient. In terms of respiratory diseases, those whose vitamin D was under the recommended levels were twice as likely to die. And those that were clinicially deficient were three times as likely to die. This was especially true for women, with the risk of dying as much as eight fold higher. As I said in April — Vitamin D affects 200 genes and is implicated in many afflictions: Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. Eskimos didn’t need to go white — they were still getting D from offal and plenty of fish. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20137299v1 The risk ratios are pretty astonishing: The Abstract Background. The COVID-19 pandemic goes along with increased mortality from acute respiratory disease, and measures to limit the spread of the infection go along with increased risk of vitamin D deficiency, especially among high risk groups. It has been suggested that vitamin D3 supplementation might help to reduce respiratory disease mortality. Methods. We assessed the prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency, defined by 25(OH)D blood levels of 30-50 and <30 nmol/L, respectively, and their association with mortality from respiratory diseases during 15 years of follow-up in a cohort of 9,548 adults aged 50-75 years from Saarland, Germany. Results. Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency were common (44% and 15%, respectively). Compared to sufficient vitamin D status, respiratory disease mortality was 2.1 (95%-CI 1.3-3.2)- and 3.0 (95%-CI 1.8-5.2)-fold increased, respectively. Although significant increases were seen in both women and men, they were much stronger among women, with 8.5 (95% CI 2.4-30.1) and 2.3 (95% CI 1.1-4.4)-fold increase of respiratory disease mortality in case of vitamin D deficiency among women and men, respectively (p-value for interaction =0.041). Overall, 41% (95% CI 20%-58%) of respiratory disease mortality was statistically attributable to vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency. Conclusion. Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency are common and account for a large proportion of respiratory disease mortality in older adults, supporting suggestions that vitamin D3 supplementation might make a major contribution to limit the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly among women. Don’t get caught without your vitamin D. (UPDATE: and if you take D3, best add K2 as well lest that Ca end up in your arteries instead of your bones). REFERENCEBrenner, Holleczek, and Schoettker, B. (2020) Vitamin D insufficiency and deficiency and mortality from respiratory diseases in a cohort of older adults: potential for limiting the death toll during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.22.20137299v1 See also: Vitamin D deficiency affects so many health conditions. Some thought provoking insights from Yoram Hazony in The Challenge Of Marxism. I’m not inclined to read analysis of anything Marxist, but this moment in history has some uncanny similarities I was not aware of, and Hazony connects the dots from Karl to Kamala (so to speak). He paints a compelling pattern, even if I want to add details and patterns myself. It’s a springboard… Read it all. The Marxists have forced out the Conservatives, now the wheel has turned and they’re coming for the Liberals, argues Hazony. The Liberal world thought they were marching through the institutions but the momentum was with the Marxists among them, who have now forged ahead and are turning on their own. Will the liberals drop their liberalism and adopt marxism, or will they push back?Anti-Marxist liberals are about to find themselves in much the same situation that has characterized conservatives, nationalists, and Christians for some time now: They are about to find themselves in the opposition. This means that some brave liberals will soon be waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled. They will try to build up alternative educational and media platforms in the shadow of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost. Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals. This is the new reality that is emerging. There is blood in the water and the new Marxists will not rest content with their recent victories. In America, they will press their advantage and try to seize the Democratic Party. They will seek to reduce the Republican Party to a weak imitation of their own new ideology, or to ban it outright as a racist organization. Language is a weapon, and they shalt not be known publicly as Marxists but by a shifting sea of names: …they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them. But they are Marxists: The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows: Hazony goes through the core Marxist concepts and we can see how so much of this framework is at play today: There is class warfare preying on people’s envy, the oppressors and oppressed. There is the invisible unknown hand of oppression that has been “AWoken”. 1. Oppressor and oppressed “…people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another…” 2. False consciousness “…the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors,…. even the working class may not know that they are exploited. “ 3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society The oppressed seize control of the state. Revolution or war. 4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms Everything will be peace and roses again if they just throw out the Orange Man. Like Marx, it’s a wonderful future but no one has any idea how to get back to peace and happiness after the revolution. I can’t do it all justice without repeating much of it. Hazoiny argues that Marxists ideas are attractive because there is a little truth underlying the tension. Groups do form. Power relations between them do have different interests and it can resemble a ruler and slave, but in most normal times it is a symbiotic relationship, not pure exploitation. The shallowness of Marxism is the superficial appeal without the principles that go under and around it. I crave a slightly more biological model — one that uses evolution and an understanding of groups and battles from power. But Hazomy powers through some core contradictions that power the Liberals. I think the biggest problem with Liberals is that they are not liberal (when the crunch comes) on the most important liberty liberals are meant to defend — free speech. Hazony writes of a group that aims for an impractical Utopia, believes in reason rather than tradition, and thus the Marxists use every admission of failing as a way to control the Liberals. In 2020 the control has become hidden in plain view as nearly every opinion (other than the permitted one) is delegitimized. Thus the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism, which goes like this: 1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights. 2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights. 3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights. 4. Return to #1 above and repeat. Liberals and Marxists are locked in this endless dance. I know that many liberals are confused, and that they still suppose there are various alternatives before them. But it isn’t true. At this point, most of the alternatives that existed a few years ago are gone. Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices. (Read it all). https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/ Hypothetically, can anyone think of a scenario where an honest win is still possible, and it will be seen to be an honest win?
Mail in votes can also be cast early — before even one debate. Sixteen states will allow voting before September 29th with people missing fully five weeks of campaigning and discussion. Isn’t there something deeply wrong about that — something that favors the lesser scrutinized candidate? Something that favours the candidate the media wants to elect and does free advertising for? Then there is the systematic problem with every man, woman and dog becoming effective electoral officers handling ballots with no observers present. We know Mail-in Voting offers a huge advantage to the Democrats and collectivists, and they know it too — just look at which side yells the loudest in protest at the thought that it might be fraudulent. The potential to cheat is so obvious most countries don’t allow mail-in ballots. Thirty seven US states have already changed their mail-in ballot rules, but overseas almost no country allows it without photo ID, or limit it to the disabled or people overseas. How is this not a recipe for disaster? Frank Miele: Election Roulette: How to Rig an OutcomeUnlike absentee ballots or early voting, which require active participation by the voter, universal mail-in voting means that every registered voter will be sent a ballot whether they want one or not — heck, even whether they are alive or not. Fact of the matter is that cheating on mail ballots is child’s play. Here, off the top of my head, are four ways to monkey with the vote: 1) A hard-core Democrat union-rep mailman is collecting mail from households in a neighborhood that skews Republican. He dutifully collects the ballots left for him, but then dumps them in the trash or (smarter) burns them in his fire pit later that night. What is the protection against this happening? Or any of the remaining scenarios below? 2) A hard-core Democrat nurse’s aide making 10 bucks an hour decides to monkey-wrench the system that she thinks is exploiting her. When she collects the ballots from 120 residents in the nursing home where she works, she volunteers to drop them at the post office “to make sure they are secure,” but then heads home and buries them in the backyard. 3) A pizza delivery guy enters an apartment building with a large pepperoni and leaves with a carton of blank ballots that were left in the lobby for pickup by the residents. The pizza guy happens to be a member of antifa and he has no problem filling out all the ballots against President Trump and the Republicans. Even if the fraud is discovered, it is highly unlikely that all the ballots will be disqualified. 4) A Democratic campaign aide who is working to “get out the vote” in a neighborhood with a high proportion of older people knocks on doors and offers to help voters mark their ballots. Not a citizen? No problem. That’s been waived. Not sure who to vote for? How about that nice Democrat! And if you do happen to vote Republican, no problem — I will deliver it for you … right to the Dumpster! So when Election 2020 is over, if the Dems don’t win, they’ll be outraged because the polls told them they would win. If the Trump supporters lose, they’ll know it was rigged, because there is no way it won’t be. It’s just a question of “how much”. When elections can’t be done so that either side respects the outcome, it defeats the whole point of an election as a peaceful way to sort out national differences. How is that not eventually the road to civil war? h/t David E
The “Aeronabs” are on the way?
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