You might want to read my post Magick (link above). There is no contradiction for me. Yin AND Yang.Gnosticism tends to lead to denial and perversion of the physical reality of the world in favor of the elevations of abstract gnosis. It is heresy in ALL creeds.
Why would the left not want small modualr nuclear reactors?
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
All the creeds that deny gnosticism are in fact afraid of the individual finding the Maker on his own. People with a direct connection are difficult to control. And there is nothing Churches and creeds love more than power and control.
"You are forbidden to look at this" is such an obvious control mechanism.
For me "You are forbidden...." is a very strong attractant.
My favorite book on the subject (also filled with a lot of nonsense) is "The Fourth Way" by Ouspensky. The rules are simple - Do Not Lie. Do Not Consider. Do Not Identify. Do Not Express Negative Emotions.
"Consider" and "Identify" are technical terms. You will have to read the book to understand what they mean.
"Test ALL things. Hold fast to that which is true."
Good advice for an engineer or a gnostic.
"You are forbidden to look at this" is such an obvious control mechanism.
For me "You are forbidden...." is a very strong attractant.
My favorite book on the subject (also filled with a lot of nonsense) is "The Fourth Way" by Ouspensky. The rules are simple - Do Not Lie. Do Not Consider. Do Not Identify. Do Not Express Negative Emotions.
"Consider" and "Identify" are technical terms. You will have to read the book to understand what they mean.
"Test ALL things. Hold fast to that which is true."
Good advice for an engineer or a gnostic.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
BTW you will note that I often to claim to be an adherent to the Jewish tradition. No contradiction. Jewish mysticism, The Kabbalah, is the heart of modern American mysticism. There are even poseurs like Madonna who claim to be followers. In my estimation she doesn't have the brains for it. Or the background. It is just a fad. For her.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
IMO, all gnosticism ends the same place it does for the Sufis - navel-gazing glorification of one's own ego.MSimon wrote:All the creeds that deny gnosticism are in fact afraid of the individual finding the Maker on his own. People with a direct connection are difficult to control. And there is nothing Churches and creeds love more than power and control.
Vae Victis
And Christians are of course immune to navel-gazing glorification of their own ego. Thank the Maker!!!djolds1 wrote:IMO, all gnosticism ends the same place it does for the Sufis - navel-gazing glorification of one's own ego.MSimon wrote:All the creeds that deny gnosticism are in fact afraid of the individual finding the Maker on his own. People with a direct connection are difficult to control. And there is nothing Churches and creeds love more than power and control.
I have been at gnosticism for 45 years. How do you explain me? A navel gazer? No one who knows me in person has ever accused me of being a navel gazer. I do get "arrogant" a LOT. Even my first mate tells me that. Which I will readily cop to.
The navel gazers IMO have never stubbed their toes. Or failed to notice when they did.
My experience is that 1 in 1,000 Christians practice Christianity. The rest? Churchianity.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Yes, very nice...
Cough...
So... the left and nuclear power is a weird thing, IMHO. On one hand, we are all supposed to reduce our carbon emissions, on the other hand, they absolutely dislike the only real option that we have to do that (at the moment anyway).
The whole proliferation aspect is IMHO an "argument from adverse consequences"- fallacy. It should be easy to resolve, as you can encase the reactor in a strong enough steel vessel that will prevent anyone from entering without alerting the entire neighbourhood. Otherwise all you need is vibration- sensors and maybe some cameras around it, together with an alarm system and a security company to guard it and you are all set. I doubt that proliferation would be worth the resulting risk/hassle, even with these moderate security measures.
Cough...
So... the left and nuclear power is a weird thing, IMHO. On one hand, we are all supposed to reduce our carbon emissions, on the other hand, they absolutely dislike the only real option that we have to do that (at the moment anyway).
The whole proliferation aspect is IMHO an "argument from adverse consequences"- fallacy. It should be easy to resolve, as you can encase the reactor in a strong enough steel vessel that will prevent anyone from entering without alerting the entire neighbourhood. Otherwise all you need is vibration- sensors and maybe some cameras around it, together with an alarm system and a security company to guard it and you are all set. I doubt that proliferation would be worth the resulting risk/hassle, even with these moderate security measures.
Getting back off topic. As to Sufis I like the works of Idries Shah.
Especially Tales of the Dervishes
Especially Tales of the Dervishes
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
I saw a blog post or letter or something somewhere where a guy told a story about how he finally realized why nuclear power has such a hard time gaining a foothold.
He looked out a window and saw a train going past. It had upwards of 100 cars on it (or at least so many that it took many minutes to go past) and each one of them was filled with coal. That coal was going to a nearby power plant. He did some quick estimating and realized that the energy generated by all of that coal could be equaled by the amount of uranium which would fit in the back of one flatbed truck.
Now, here's the kicker. How many people does it take to mine a trucks worth of uranium? How many people does it take to mine a train's worth of coal? The job losses are staggering if you shift from a coal based energy source to a nuclear one. So, at the time coal won because politicians wanted to keep jobs in their districts.
Fast forward to today. Now coal isn't what provides jobs for our families and constituents; it's what's killing the world. So, we need an alternative. Of course! *Green* energy. Perfect. It's cleaner than fossil fuels, and it's more diffuse than coal/oil/gas and thus creates more jobs. It's a perfect energy source for politicians, because they can claim to care about the health and welfare of the planet, while generating jobs in their districts. Except for one problem: none of it works. Ethanol is a bad joke, geothermal is mostly limited geographically or to a heating/cooling role, wind just flat doesn't work (see Texas), and solar is really only useful in a passive capacity. There may be technological advances in the future, which is great for politicians, because they can be seen as funding research for the future, but for now none of them are usable in the least.
Nuclear energy is concentrated and compact. It has a small footprint. Unfortunately that's politically unpalatable because we need 10 million jobs RIGHT NOW and green energy is a great place to get them from, aside from the fact that it doesn't work.
Also, don't think this is limited to the US or just rambling on my part. This was an Australian ad campaign from a few years back: http://depletedcranium.com/anti-nuclear_coal_ad_md.jpg
He looked out a window and saw a train going past. It had upwards of 100 cars on it (or at least so many that it took many minutes to go past) and each one of them was filled with coal. That coal was going to a nearby power plant. He did some quick estimating and realized that the energy generated by all of that coal could be equaled by the amount of uranium which would fit in the back of one flatbed truck.
Now, here's the kicker. How many people does it take to mine a trucks worth of uranium? How many people does it take to mine a train's worth of coal? The job losses are staggering if you shift from a coal based energy source to a nuclear one. So, at the time coal won because politicians wanted to keep jobs in their districts.
Fast forward to today. Now coal isn't what provides jobs for our families and constituents; it's what's killing the world. So, we need an alternative. Of course! *Green* energy. Perfect. It's cleaner than fossil fuels, and it's more diffuse than coal/oil/gas and thus creates more jobs. It's a perfect energy source for politicians, because they can claim to care about the health and welfare of the planet, while generating jobs in their districts. Except for one problem: none of it works. Ethanol is a bad joke, geothermal is mostly limited geographically or to a heating/cooling role, wind just flat doesn't work (see Texas), and solar is really only useful in a passive capacity. There may be technological advances in the future, which is great for politicians, because they can be seen as funding research for the future, but for now none of them are usable in the least.
Nuclear energy is concentrated and compact. It has a small footprint. Unfortunately that's politically unpalatable because we need 10 million jobs RIGHT NOW and green energy is a great place to get them from, aside from the fact that it doesn't work.
Also, don't think this is limited to the US or just rambling on my part. This was an Australian ad campaign from a few years back: http://depletedcranium.com/anti-nuclear_coal_ad_md.jpg
Off topic
The Gnostic/Mystic argument, as truly interesting as it is, it does not belong in this thread.
Will an administrator please create a new thread somewhere else and place those arguments above into it? While they're still easily separable?
Will an administrator please create a new thread somewhere else and place those arguments above into it? While they're still easily separable?
On Topic
I live in Northern California. Translation: I'm besieged by liberals who think of nuclear power --all nuclear power-- as contaminating and deadly. When they are pressed as to the reason for their phobia, for the large majority it becomes apparent they're talking about the once-through, light water, thermal spectrum paradigm. They speak of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, oceanic dumping, core rods laying in the snow and nuclear waste lasting thousands of years, Which is to say they're stuck in the 1980s; and they often have very little understanding of the technical side of nuclear power.
These are people who can often be quickly converted by drawing a line between Gen3 and Gen4, telling them about using the 'waste' of previous reactors as fuel, reducing that 'waste' to very small volumes that need containment for hundreds, not thousands of years, and comparing those cool-down times to the difference between the time Cro-Magnon came out of Africa (60-100kyr) and the birth of Benjamin Franklin (300yr). If you then add that Gen4 will be cheap from mass production, that they're generally china-syndrome proof by design, that weapons proliferation is very difficult and that the man who created the Whole Earth Catalog is backing them, they're usually convinced to at least look into it. (I've found LFTR to be especially persuasive for this population of liberal, as it is greatly different in description to LWR.)
That is the majority of liberals I've run into, which includes my sister-in-law, who protested the building of several nuclear reactors in California in her 20s. There is a different population of nuclear skeptics, however, who like to speak of "Soft Energy Paths", a book by Amory B. Lovins. This group is far harder to convince because they're usually at least somewhat knowledgeable on the subject of nuclear power and they are not using the usual arguments.
First, they draw a line between "soft" and "hard" energy solutions. "Hard" solutions are large scale, single answers, like electric power plants transporting high-grade energy from a few energy plants to many consumers. "Soft" solutions are small scale, locally gathered, multiple-path answers, like wood stoves, solar heater, PV-solar personal wind turbines and micro-hydro installs. Small, overlapping energy collectors mostly meant to provide low quality power for a single building or property.
The argument goes like this: No matter what the hard power solution is, it involves collecting energy and shipping it elsewhere. The collection of energy, be it nuclear, fossil, solar or anything else, involves efficiency loss. That can't be avoided. Any time you ship energy you also have an efficiency loss. You can't avoid the first, but you can avoid the second by keeping the energy production close to where it's used. That means small power plants in individual buildings/properties, collecting just enough power for local use.
Of course, being low grade energy, soft solutions are really only useful for certain things: mostly heating an cooling. Which is to say, controlling the heat of your house, controlling the heat of your water, controlling the heat of your food. Fortunately, that's about a third of your entire energy usage. If you then take into account the transport efficiency losses you've managed to avoid, you'll have reduced the energy load off the current system by 35-40%.
This means you can concentrate your hard, high-grade solutions where they belong: Industry, recycling and transport. All without concentrating power (both watts and politics) into something that can so easily be used to control the populace. (By power companies and Govt.)
I know I've botched the argument somewhat, as I don't entirely understand it. I've yet to fully wrap my head around the entire viewpoint and so I'm only describing one aspect of "soft energy solutions" POV.
These are people who can often be quickly converted by drawing a line between Gen3 and Gen4, telling them about using the 'waste' of previous reactors as fuel, reducing that 'waste' to very small volumes that need containment for hundreds, not thousands of years, and comparing those cool-down times to the difference between the time Cro-Magnon came out of Africa (60-100kyr) and the birth of Benjamin Franklin (300yr). If you then add that Gen4 will be cheap from mass production, that they're generally china-syndrome proof by design, that weapons proliferation is very difficult and that the man who created the Whole Earth Catalog is backing them, they're usually convinced to at least look into it. (I've found LFTR to be especially persuasive for this population of liberal, as it is greatly different in description to LWR.)
That is the majority of liberals I've run into, which includes my sister-in-law, who protested the building of several nuclear reactors in California in her 20s. There is a different population of nuclear skeptics, however, who like to speak of "Soft Energy Paths", a book by Amory B. Lovins. This group is far harder to convince because they're usually at least somewhat knowledgeable on the subject of nuclear power and they are not using the usual arguments.
First, they draw a line between "soft" and "hard" energy solutions. "Hard" solutions are large scale, single answers, like electric power plants transporting high-grade energy from a few energy plants to many consumers. "Soft" solutions are small scale, locally gathered, multiple-path answers, like wood stoves, solar heater, PV-solar personal wind turbines and micro-hydro installs. Small, overlapping energy collectors mostly meant to provide low quality power for a single building or property.
The argument goes like this: No matter what the hard power solution is, it involves collecting energy and shipping it elsewhere. The collection of energy, be it nuclear, fossil, solar or anything else, involves efficiency loss. That can't be avoided. Any time you ship energy you also have an efficiency loss. You can't avoid the first, but you can avoid the second by keeping the energy production close to where it's used. That means small power plants in individual buildings/properties, collecting just enough power for local use.
Of course, being low grade energy, soft solutions are really only useful for certain things: mostly heating an cooling. Which is to say, controlling the heat of your house, controlling the heat of your water, controlling the heat of your food. Fortunately, that's about a third of your entire energy usage. If you then take into account the transport efficiency losses you've managed to avoid, you'll have reduced the energy load off the current system by 35-40%.
This means you can concentrate your hard, high-grade solutions where they belong: Industry, recycling and transport. All without concentrating power (both watts and politics) into something that can so easily be used to control the populace. (By power companies and Govt.)
I know I've botched the argument somewhat, as I don't entirely understand it. I've yet to fully wrap my head around the entire viewpoint and so I'm only describing one aspect of "soft energy solutions" POV.
I definitely get that distinction.
FWIW, I have two 32 square foot solar collectors running on the cabin at the moment. Their daily heat output is about the same as burning 7.5 pounds of wood. Eventually I will have twice that capacity. Helpful, but not adequate on its own. Were I to have bought those panels new, they would have cost something like $8000 for the set of four that will eventually go in. The capital costs to compare to, for example, gas heat are enormous. The way to counter the soft energy crowd is to challenge them to get people to volunteer to go to the extremes needed to make it work. I do it because I'm nuts enough to think it is a fun hobby.
Edison's neighborhood powerplants would meet that definition of "soft". They were small and distributed. They utilized waste heat to heat homes. But they burned coal, with dozens of these beasts all over crowded cities. DC still uses something similar for government buildings. This is hardly a green solution.
And wind advocates now don't consider turbine grids small-scale. They speak in terms of massive grids designed to equalize power to take advantage of shifting wind availablity. So evidently wind does not qualify and neighborhood coal plants do? Try that on them.
FWIW, I have two 32 square foot solar collectors running on the cabin at the moment. Their daily heat output is about the same as burning 7.5 pounds of wood. Eventually I will have twice that capacity. Helpful, but not adequate on its own. Were I to have bought those panels new, they would have cost something like $8000 for the set of four that will eventually go in. The capital costs to compare to, for example, gas heat are enormous. The way to counter the soft energy crowd is to challenge them to get people to volunteer to go to the extremes needed to make it work. I do it because I'm nuts enough to think it is a fun hobby.
Edison's neighborhood powerplants would meet that definition of "soft". They were small and distributed. They utilized waste heat to heat homes. But they burned coal, with dozens of these beasts all over crowded cities. DC still uses something similar for government buildings. This is hardly a green solution.
And wind advocates now don't consider turbine grids small-scale. They speak in terms of massive grids designed to equalize power to take advantage of shifting wind availablity. So evidently wind does not qualify and neighborhood coal plants do? Try that on them.
Um.... I hate to say it, but I kjnow a number of environmentalists who are pro-fusion and pro-fission, though they'd prefer fusion if they could get it. The environmental movement is huge-- and like the democratic/republican parties has a huge variation in membership from true believers to people who show up for the bake sales because they like the cookies. IE, I know some who want us to return to our roots of subsistance villagers, and who have never explained where the 6 billion odd people who you can't feed that way go, to another green who pushes fission and fusion, and loudly hopes that one day coal mines will go the way of the dodo.
It's true that some are the natural enemies of science and technology-- but don't paint with too broad of a brush because you might find that you're alienating some potential allies.
It's true that some are the natural enemies of science and technology-- but don't paint with too broad of a brush because you might find that you're alienating some potential allies.
Check out my blog-- not just about fusion, but anything that attracts this 40 something historians interest.