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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-269
Last week's posts on Moon of Alabama:
> Amid a breakdown of trust between society, the army and the political leadership, Ukraine is struggling to replace battlefield losses with conscription, barely hitting two-thirds of its target. Russia, meanwhile, is replacing its losses by recruitment with lucrative contracts, without needing to revert to mass mobilisation. A senior Ukrainian military commander admits that there has been a collapse in morale in some of the worst sections of the front. A source in the general staff suggests that nearly a fifth of soldiers have gone AWOL from their positions. <
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Other issues:
Valdai:
Multipolarity:
Aukus:
Boeing's moves towards a bailout:
Use as open (not related to the wars in Ukraine and Palestine) thread …
Re Valencia and dams
TD;LR of this post: alternatives are available and technologically mature. Perhaps they should be used.
Long form:
The argument in favour of dams is flood water control. The argument against dams is long term ecological damage.
While not all problems are amenable to a “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” type of interpretation (most problems are probably not naturally good fits), we have a thesis-antithesis-synthesis type of problem here.
Flood waters cause massive problems; they can be controlled for medium term improvement with damming et alia. (Thesis)
Damming causes massive long term ecological problems that become economical problems, e.g. fisheries and coastal erosion; dams are undesirable. (Antithesis)
What is telling is the absence of a synthesis, despite mature technology being available, including for situations (e.g. southern African plateau flooding) where damming is not a tenable solution at all.
What distinguishes a flood from a normal river flow situation is merely the rate of inflow being excessive, causing the level to rise until outflow is equalized (outflow being an increasing function of water level above river bed; rate rise being proportional to difference between inflow and outflow; strictly PDEs, but interpretable via an ODE framework).
Normally, water is drawn from rivers (dams, et alia, even ground water) into a water treatment facility, treated (coagulation, flocculation, sediment settling, removal of undesired ions e.g. Fe^{2+/3+}, Mg^{2+}, Mn^{2+}). Biological control is then exercised (typically chlorination of some sort, e.g. Cl_2(g), Ca(OCl)_2 et alia, and the resulting potable water is stored before transportation (usually pumping) to users.
Waste water from users is then similarly treated, albeit with steps to remove Chemical Oxygen Demand, Ammonia, Nitrates, Nitrites, Phosphates, and Boron (from modern soaps), before being returned to the river (or another receiving body of water), downstream of the intake.
In Namibia (Windhoek) and Singapore, there is some feeding of the treated wastewater back into the potable supply, but in Europe and North America, that is a sufficient taboo, that suitably treated wastewater must be stored for several months in a larger receiving body of water in order for it to be so consumed.
The main technological problem that remains is getting rid of excess salinity in the wastewater, although that is not the issue here regarding dams and flood control.
The alternative to massive damming (and one that could work on occasionally flood-prone plateaus) is a large scale water reuse system, that has in normal operation (perhaps after a long transient after start-up, perhaps measured in decades, for ten-year flood cycles) a non-flood 25% utilization reservoir system, perhaps underground (e.g. avoid mosquito breeding); the pump and treatment utilization rate during non-flood conditions would be similar.
This also allows (via the capture of sediment above) for sediment to be returned downstream to avoid coastal erosion, and with suitable intake openings for the pumps, accidental intake of fish can be minimized as well.
The main difficulty with such a system is keeping the institutionalized incompetence known as bean counting at bay. There will always be baboons in human skin that will go on about how 25% utilization rate is “inefficient,” because one is not supposed to consider the total efficiency of a system, within the framework of institutionalized incompetence.
A bit of counter-intelligence is thus needed to catch bean counters before they can do any damage, and I suggest that a legal framework already exists: whereas the western backed Ugandan exile Tuutsis that invaded Rwanda in 1990 were bashing in the skulls of Rwandans Hutus in large scale massacres after which they severed the heads and threw the corpses into rivers, and whereas said Ugandan exile Tuutsis passed off the skulls from said process as the “skulls of Tuutsi victims,” and whereas this is accepted implicitly in the western legal systems, I propose that the law courts should have no problem, if detected bean counters (from the counter intelligence work, e.g. where they are given the “opportunity to improve efficiency,” and show themselves to be so incompetent) are subject to execution at the hands of flood victims, a la the murder of Rwandan Hutus, to wit, having their skulls bashed in with hoes while still alive, their heads then severed from their bodies, the flesh allowed to rot off, and the skulls of the bean counters (of whatever ethnicity) then being reclassified as “Tuutsi victims of the Rwandan genocide” as the skulls of baHutu victims were so treated previously. Judicial consistency would surely demand it.
Posted by: Johan Meyer (2) | Nov 11 2024 16:50 utc | 145
@juliania | 168 – We can have multipolar conversations here just fine, methinks 🙂
Aristotle’s metaphysical aperçu. – perhaps the most brilliant in all of written philosophy – that ‘awareness is awareness of awareness’ concerns not only us humans, but (according to Plotin) also stones and (according to Mani) God, who is described as having an Über-Ich (Freud; superego) going by the name of Thomas and being female in nature.
Martin Buber’s Du, Thou, is the generic constituting element of We next to I; which is not essentially different, yet has other faculties – as I’d say – while acknowleding this question is very intricate. Edmund Husserl likened other Thou to his own self’s future and past, which I don’t quite grok yet.
The essence of Self, distinguished from each specific ‘transcendental ego’ [i.e. capable of noesis/awareness], is one and only one, which Husserl calls the Ich-Pol. Conversely, the We=I+n*Thou extends (reciprocally) over every Thou just as much, and together this forms the (singular!) Intersubjekt; a term recently invented here by my colleague and friend Wadah Mahmoud.
Husserl’s later writings on intersubjectivity and ethics, pulled from his literary remains only recently, are truly fascinating. The topic is highly current and dynamic, but I’m not going to bore you with research details much. Let me instead recount my recent visit to Freiburg, where he spent his last 30 years, to be buried in a small yet dignified grave out in one of the valleys around the city. He chose this place himself, not completely free as he was subject to the Nazi race laws, as well as mobbing by his neighbours, which forced him to move out of town, upside the hills surrounding Freiburg, into an enormous mansion overlooking the city below. Quite the statement.
His chosen place of burial is a statement as well. It’s close to a nun monastery, St. Lioba in Güntersthal, which resides in a truly fantastic mansion, overdone built by a federal judge after 1900 and auctioned off during the years of inflation. It feels like teleporting 20,000 years into the future there. Husserl apparently loved the indescribable atmosphere of peace and serenity of this location; I can relate.
Quite a few of Husserl’s students were women, a number of them jewish converts like himself. Many lifelong friendships arose between them. Edith Stein is the most famous figure, being canonized by John Paul II. Gerda Walther is another, who wrote a brief article on Husserlian ideas in parapsychology (1965), which presents the very same idea I also had in 2017. She didn’t work out her idea then, after experiencing visions of ‘strings of light’ – resembling the lihme, ‘like strings, but not made of matter, connecting us, the ancestors, the stars and God’ as Mani of all people put it. The lihme served as the principle idea behind my first attempt at crafting a proper methodology to tackle telepathic intuitions; I had the idea first, and found this exactly fitting term later in manichaeic writings, to only then discover Gerda Walther. She went (like Edith Stein) into a monastery, perhaps avoiding a psychiatric institution. I’m not sure, but there is an autobiography of 800 pages which I may come to read, not least because she seems to have roots in Ukraine and knew all the actors of post-war political machinations, including Bandera. The book was handed to me by Dr. Bauer on occassion of my visit to the IGPP, Germany’s only parapsychological research institute, located in … Freiburg.
Posted by: persiflo | Nov 12 2024 3:21 utc | 172
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