The trapdoor into the future.

What is wrong with ‘reversalists’? Christendom was told to ‘guard the traditions’ in the Church, and she did so for 1800 years. Now, if Rome, in departing from conciliar tradition, got lost along the way, and called Gallileo a heretic, at least we had the Renaissance, Opera, Giotto, Dante, at the same time.

IF one were to go back to a smaller style/scale of living, crime would surely decrease, for criminals would not have free access to areas outside their ghettos, family groups would not be scattered to the four winds, you would know your butcher, your baker, and candlestick maker, and thus, the mega-corporation could not give you the shaft for higher prices, for your tradesmen would have to meet you face to face at the local altar of the Christian church. Short of the storage capabilities of the modern computer, I see nothing of merit in movies made since 1967- that frankly goes for all forms of popular culture, including Rap, VH-1, MTV, Paris, Brittany, Madonna, Michael Jackson, etc.

Local musicians were at least able to be THE focus of culture in their area, and they were paid for their services, unlike today, when Joshua Bell can undertake a one-hour experiment in the London Underground, and only come away with $13.47 in pocket change. All western forms of self-expression have devolved to the level of the pervert, the anarchist, or the merely Jewish.

The Ladder is ALWAYS there. We were MADE to climb back down it at Babel, and again, when Rome Fell. That God in His mercy allowed us to do so, was done with the hope that we might do it better the next time around. But if we miscegenate ourselves into a multicultural hell-hole, then I guess you’re right.  But this time, we are not going up… except maybe in smoke, when the Parousia hits, and the world ends.

Also, what about JJR’s claims that ethanol from sugar cane grown in the tropics can supply a huge part of the need? (Not so much from corn grown in the temperate zones, which he said was a much less efficient way to go about it — but there’s that too.) Will ethanol count for zip, then?  But aren’t they running a good proportion of Brazil’s cars on the stuff already?  (Forgive my ignorance, I don’t keep abreast of this.)

When you add up ethanol, fission, wind, solar, hydroelectric, ocean-tidal, geothermal, odds and ends like ocean-floor methane and stuff, there still won’t be enough to keep us from going back to sailing ships and horse-and-buggies?

“also wants railways,” (—from the entry)

Kunstler sees those, presumably, as steam-driven, and burning what?  Wood?  With diesel and coal out, what else will there be?  If they build fission-fueled locomotives presumably there’ll also be lots of fission-powered electricity-generating plants, implying affordable battery-powered cars, cars that won’t go fast but at least faster than a horse-and-buggy.

Even in the worst case, combines and similar equipment would get first dibs on rationed oil products. Nothing to see here…

“The first supercomputer company, Control Data Corporation, was founded by a Nebraska farm boy, Bill Norris” (—James B)

Where did Cray fit into all this?

“Nebraska farm boy, Bill Norris”

Another one who came off a mid-western farm somewhere was Claude Shannon, one of the world’s most brilliant “theoretical engineers” (a theoretical physicist, actually) of the XXth Century, the guy who came up with the first rigorous thermodynamic treatments of what we all know and love as “information.” I’ll never forget first coming across those entropy equations for “information” in college chemistry.  I couldn’t believe it.  I said to my roommate, “Ya know, they know what “information” is — have got it all precisely defined in terms of thermodynamics.” He looked at the equations and couldn’t get over it — in my mind I can see his broad, astonished smile.  I still haven’t gotten over it to this day.  An absolutely incredible feat Shannon pulled off.  I love that guy.

Here’s more than you may want to know about Seymour Cray’s role.  Suffice to say, Cray and Norris talked a lot about things like surviving nuclear war, and the military vulnerability of cities compared to yeoman farms which were, at that time, fast disappearing from the landscape due to forces Norris, at least, was trying to counter-act:

[flash forward]

Word of the team’s success buzzed through the computer industry with extraordinary speed.  Within days the Business Week article found its way to the highest office in IBM, prompting a scathing memo from company president Thomas Watson:

Last week Control Data had a press conference during which they officially announced their 6600 system.  I understand that in the laboratory developing this system there are only 34 people, including the janitor.  Of these 14 are engineers and 4 are programmers, and only one person has a Ph.D., a relatively junior programmer.  Constrasting this modest effort with our own vast development activities, I fail to understand why we have lost our industry leadership position by letting someone else offer the world’s most powerful computer.

[flash back]

As soon as they arrived at the new facility, the crew began to realize just how detached they were.  After ambling through the building’s tiny lobby and sitting down in their labs every morning, they suddenly realized that they had no interruptions.  It was a strange sensation, somewhat like sitting next to a piece of humming machinery for days on end, then having someone turn it off.  The newfound peace was striking.

The advantages were even greater for Cray. He had a beautiful Praire-style home built on the sixty-five-acre site, only a couple hundred yards from the new facility.  Cray design the home himself, and it was an extraordinary piece of construction—no one in Chippewa had ever seen anything quite like it.  From the outset Cray had considered what he would need in the event of a nuclear blast, and had designed the lower level of the home as a fallout shelter.  Joists in the spacious first floor were made from cold rolled steel, then topped with four-inch-thick concrete slab.  Block walls in the basement were also filled with concrete; doors between lower level rooms were fireproof.  A six-foot-deep pool in the basement doubled as a potential source of potable water and ten-thousand-gallon underground tank held enough oil to last through four winters.  Construction workers were in awe of the building, saying that the basement contained more steel reinforcing than the new bank that was being built downtown.  Cray also added his own inventive touch, designing an air-conditioning system that would spray water on the roof and cool the house through an evaporative process.

The best part for Cray, however, was the new home’s proximity to the Chippewa lab.  With the lab only about eight hundred feet away, he could work any hours he wanted.  He simply shuttled back and forth by walking through the forest that separated the two buildings.

After Cray and the other engineers moved into the new facility, management intervention ground to a halt.  Most of the corporate directors felt that it was too far to drive.  Long-distance calling was considered more trouble than it was worth in 1962 because it required operator assistance…

To maintain privacy Cray set up strict rules regarding visitors:  no sales calls, no management meetings, no visits of any kind without his permission.  In the Wisconsin woods, the engineers had a pure, blissful, bare-bones isolation.  No one—not even Bill Norris—could walk in without an appointment…

Despite the isolation, word of their impending success began to trickle out of Chippewa Falls.  Something unusual was happening up there in the north woods of Wisconsin, and the rest of the industry wanted to know what it was.  At the time—mid-1963—the computer industry was so small that it was nearly impossible to keep secrets.  Cray’s self-imposed isolation slowed the normal buzz of information, but word still traveled quickly.  Programmers at the Livermore lab were already anxious to buy the Chippewa crew’s first machine.  Word quickly spread to Los Alamos and to the National Security Agency in Washington.  Everyone in the community, it seemed, had a problem that needed the speed of a CDC 6600.

In August 1963 Control Data opened the lab to selected members of the press, including the Wall Street Journal and Business Week magazine.  At the unveiling, Cray sat in front of the machine’s television like console, describing its processor, memories and cooling system.  He quietly explained the marketing strategies and the logic behind the move to Chippewa Falls.  The press was stunned, not by the computer itself, but by the apparent incongruity of this high-tech machine emerging from such a low-tech setting.  A Business Week article prominently mentioned the fact that there was “salt lick for the deer” outside the Chippewa Falls lab, then it followed by saying that the 6600 “is several times as fast and powerful as any other computing machine in existence.  In fact, nothing quite like it has ever appeared on the market before.” But the article saved its highest praise for the small-team effort, saying that “Cray’s staff numbers 34, including the night janitor.”

Source: The Supermen by Charles J. Murray

I posted the following book review to Barnes and Noble’s web site on August 17, 2000 after purchasing the book from them and reading it. It is now November 19, 2000, the book is no longer in stock at B&N and there is only one copy left in the B&N “Rare, Secondhand & Out of Print” database:

The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards behind the Supercomputer
ISBN: 0471048852

A review by Jim Bowery
August 17, 2000,

The Rise and Fall of Midwest Computing Sans PLATO

This is a great book. It conveys much of the flavor of what it was like to be in the Midwest’s computing culture in its heyday of the 60’s through the 70’s. What it failed to do was tell the real story of the Midwest’s demise as computing leader of the world—which isn’t the story of Seymour’s obsession with packaging over on-chip integration, as implied by this book. Rather it is the story of the failure to deploy the network revolution, now embodied in the Internet, to the mass-market 20 years early on Seymour’s matured hardware via the PLATO networking project at Control Data Corporation. PLATO was a $1 billion ‘bet the company’ investment by Bill Norris, the farmer/CEO of CDC who put a windmill pump from his Nebraska farm in front of CDC’s corporate towers to remind people where they came from. That is the story of epic proportions only grazed on by this book. PLATO was ready to go to mass market, but Wall Street combined with classic middle mismanagement killed the mass market version of PLATO before it could even be test marketed—for which it was ready. Had it gone otherwise, Seymour probably would never have left the Midwest, and his supercomputer architecture would have focused more on the directions now being taken by Sun and Hewlett Packard—except with Seymour’s inimitable qualities.

I personally worked with the PLATO project and tested a version of it that would have leased a network computer with Macintosh-like interface, including network service, for a flat rate of $40/month with capital payback in 3 years. It had everything—email, conferencing, user-programmable electronic commerce, multiuser real-time graphics games not to mention thousands of hours of computer based education courseware for which the PLATO system was originally designed. We could get this performance because the culture surrounding the land grant colleges of the Midwest, such as the University of Illinois where PLATO originated, combined with Seymour’s astounding performance levels created the right tradeoffs between hardware/software. Some of us were looking forward to incorporating Seymour’s newly marketed Cray-1 as the foundation for the next generation of mass-market PLATO system. Initial benchmarks looked to provide an outstanding bang for the buck as an information utility hub—even without some of the more obvious architectural optimizations that would help in this new kind of application of his systems. This would have shielded Seymour from the vagaries of the government-dominated supercomputer market and driven his architectures into higher levels of silicon integration faster. This, in turn possibly providing the kind of capital in the kind of organization that could have delivered on gallium arsenide’s potential, unlike the disaster that occurred when Seymour left his farm and went cheek-to-cheek with the military in Colorado Springs, CO.

If you look at your Internet Explorer Help menu and select About Internet Explorer, you’ll notice it is based on the NCSA Mosaic web browser and that it was developed at the University of Illinois—right across the street from where PLATO was invented. This was no fluke. PLATO had a profound impact on the culture of the University of Illinois particularly its young students who wanted to push the envelope in networking. The NCSA also gave rise the most widely used web server, Apache, and the the founders of Netscape. The loss of possibly 20 years of ‘new economy’ is incalculable, but suffice to say, comparable losses have been suffered as the result of open war.

There are a lot of anecdotes this book doesn’t tell that will probably die with the people who lived the tale. Just one, to capture a bit of what will be lost to history:

People looking for Cray Research’s facility in the fields of Wisconsin could drive up to a farm house and ask where ‘Cray Research’ was located and friendly neighbor would say, ‘Oh, you mean Seymour’s place...’ and then give directions to an area surrounded by an almost invisible network of intelligence agency surveillance equipment—protecting what was seen as a national treasure from potential espionage. In a speech to one of these agencies, Seymour told them they could come out and protect his folks but only if they never got in the way, and that meant not even letting anyone know they were around. Well, you could tell they were around, but at least they didn’t get in the way!

“Further he sent his son away to a New England prep school which, in those days, was as insular white bread as Iowa.”

It’s a little hard to tell if this slander is by the poster just above or simply a quote by someone else, but it is Talmudic to the core to use language like “insular white bread” which is, of course, one of the memes (or an application therreof) that regards European Americans as undistinguised & undifferentiated blobs of whiteness. And the use of a food name (white bread) is an explicit way to smother our diversity, and to preach to us about our need for diversity well beyond that provided to us by the exotic variety of national origin peoples from Europe, as well as the vibrant ethnicities from Europe. All that white diversity falls before the unremarked slander quoted above.

If readers can swallow this formulation (insular white bread) without comment or objection, then the sky is the limit for Jewish control of our names and our ideas about ourselves.

“If readers can swallow this formulation (insular white bread) without comment or objection, then the sky is the limit for Jewish control of our names and our ideas about ourselves.”

It’s not just Jewish control, but the entire white-hating-left that seeks to control our ideas about ourselves.

http://www.resistingdefamation.org/

click on slurs for more examples.

>>>white bread (a food-based hate caricature often seen in connection with “mayonnaise”; a showing of contempt; an attempt to smother European American diversity)

Reversal, or any type of regress is not what anyone is talking about. Present society is bloatware needing patches, like when a new version of Windows is released. Patching software riddled with little errors and open security holes is not reversalism. Much of the software code could be trimmed down, likewise for the volume and frequency of our overwhelmingly gluttony-driven aracialist, cultureless industrialized civilization.

Our cumbersome fossil fuel industrialization may yet transition into a radically new form. Nanotechnology is yet in an embryonic state and from out of this, as some technocrats hope, will bloom both new materials and alternative means of energy production. Their vision, it seems, is a lower profile, a more elegant and a true on-demand product industry. Coupled with an environment inundated with various “helper systems” we would also have a true on-demand services industry. See Designing for Interaction by Dan Saffer for more.

The non-technocrat types think more pragmatically, hoping for less industry, and that only to serve human necessity rather than wants while reasserting cultural pursuits in the vacancy once filled by want-driven consumerism. The non-technocrats are overwhelmingly neo-liberal egalitarians and I have found this is precisely why supposed Aryan racialist types are aligned with Jews, bourgoise liberal gentiles and all neocons against their own Aryan folk and tradition (i.e. fallacious Guilt by Association with “tree huggers"). In reality, this cultural/naturalist politcal ground with tangible group survival benefits has been foolishly capitulated, essentially like giving up, with no contest, a tactical position like a rugged hilltop having good cover and a wide view on the field of battle already being lost by the good guys.

Want-driven industrialization got us multiculturalism and a European mankind crowded out of his historic homelands. Proponents of heavy industry consumerism and its logical offshoots globalization and multiculturalism are no friend to their own people.

Regarding Fred Scooby’s query about fusion energy:

Yes there are many potential sources of energy fusion among them but you don’t need to get as speculative as fusion or even “squirt gun” Johnson’s thermoelectric generator to find lots of energy.

The problem isn’t energy technology—it is that capital sources nowadays are corrupted by capital welfare in the form of economic rents.  The use of the tax system to transfer wealth from producers to owners by protecting the property rights of owners, mostly free of charge, is driving yeomen into the welfare state themselves, depriving them not only of the capital required to see their inventions through to completion but also depriving them of the independent, non-compliant, character of the inventor.

Oh, there _is_ an exception to the absence of taxes on property rights:  Patent fees.  Patent fees are confiscatory and kill any attempt at independent invention by bankrupting inventors before they can acquire capital to build fully functional demonstrator prototypes.

More here.

File this in the “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t” folder and the “These Goddamned Assholes On The Other Side Are Complete Lunatics And You Can Never Please Them, Never” folder:

A quote from Der Spiegel, 23 January 2008:

The European Union has announced plans to increase the use of gas and diesel produced from plants. But the critique against biofuels is mounting. Many say they are even more harmful than conventional fossil fuels. […]

The evidence against biofuels marshalled by [Dr. Andrew] Boswell and other environmentalists appears quite damning. Advertised as a fuel that only emits the amount of carbon dioxide that the plants absorb while growing – making it carbon neutral – it actually has resulted in a profitable industrial sector attractive to countries around the world. Vast swaths of forest have been felled and burned in Argentina and elsewhere for soya plantations. Carbon-rich peat bogs are being drained and rain forests destroyed in Indonesia to make way for extensive palm oil farming.

Because the forests are often torched and the peat rapidly oxidizes, the result is huge amounts of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. Furthermore, healthy peat bogs and forests absorb CO2 – scientists refer to them as “carbon sinks” – making their disappearance doubly harmful. […]

Environmentalists say that emissions aren’t the only serious problem created by the biofuel boom. Even crops grown in northern countries, like corn in the United States or rapeseed in Germany and the rest of Europe, harbor major dangers to the climate. Both maize and rapeseed are voracious consumers of nitrogen, leading farmers to use large quantities of nitrous oxide fertilizers. But when nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere, it reflects 300 times as much heat as carbon dioxide does. […]

Another issue receiving increasing attention recently is that of rising food prices as foodstuffs are turned into fuel. Price increases for soybeans and corn hit developing countries particularly hard. […]

Slowly, it appears that some governments are beginning to listen to the chorus of criticisms. Last autumn, the Canadian province of Quebec announced that it would cease building plants to produce the biofuel ethanol. And on Monday, the UK’s House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee called for a stop in the increase of biofuel use. “Biofuels can reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transport. But at present, most biofuels have a detrimental impact on the environment overall,” committee chairman Tim Yeo said, according to Reuters.

The European Union has reacted with anger to the UK report. Andris Piebalgs, European Commissioner for Energy, told the Guardian that “the Commission strongly disagrees with the conclusion of the British House of Commons report.”

A quote from EUobserver, 24 January 2008

Corporate Europe Observatory, (CEO) a lobby watchdog group based in the Netherlands, is worried that the [European Commission] is taking into account the interests of the biofuel industry and ignoring the warnings of scientists, noting that the EU Joint Research Centre and the UK Parliament Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) have expressed strong doubts about biofuel sustainability, with the EAC calling for a moratorium on biofuel targets. […]

“Most biofuels now appear to be worse for the climate than oil,” said Friends of the Earth Europe’s Sonja Meister. “There is not enough good agriculture land to grow food, feed and biofuels. The JRC report said any expansion in Europe would mean ploughing grasslands, which will result in huge greenhouse gas emissions,” she added.

GT,

“Land availability in Europe is a non-problem for the Globalists. Why?  North America has nowhere near the population density of Europe.  There is LOTs of arable land – that is, land that can be cultivated for growing crops – remaining in the United States and Canada.  LOTS ‘n LOTS.”

You can add Russia and the Ukraine to the list of available arable land for crops.  Huge tracts of arable land lie fallow in European Russia and the Ukraine.  Huge.  Increased utilization only needs a political stimulus.

Maguire

I’d appreciate it if one of you guys, or both, would write up an article critiquing the claims of a $1/gallon ethanol biomass converter from:

http://www.coskataenergy.com/

If you want I’ll publish here for you.

Yes, and lots of the independent praise for the process is from the tribe, at least in the few articles I’ve read so far.