The Ship of Fools

The Ship of Fools

Chronicle of Ordinary Madness

January 6, 2008

• page1 -

I would like to have good news to announce.

I suddenly think of a line from a poem by Jacques Prévert:

- Those who manufacture pens in cellars, with which others will write that everything is for the best

My readers constantly send me internet addresses for videos. I am spoiled for choice when it comes to evoking horrors. I feel like saying, "Where shall we begin? With a file on the misdeeds of the Taser? With the confidences made by Russo six months before his death? I want to flee this blank page, this empty screen that I am about to fill. I would like to be carefree. I manage it nonetheless, let my readers be reassured. I have found the cane I needed, upon which I can lean. An old friend even insisted on giving it to me. One gets used to it. But I dream of one day flying a hang glider again, of running on the grass and feeling my feet leave the ground and steering my flight by mimicking that of the sparrowhawks.

My friend Daniel is recovering from the incredible story he experienced a few months ago, when gangsters forced him to take off, heading for a prison yard, for a jailbreak. It sounds like a gag.

*- We are going to take off. You are going to take us, my buddy and me, to the prison. We will give you directions and we will go pick up a friend of ours.

• You are crazy! It's a two-seater....
• What? The manual said: 700 kilos...
• 700 kilos total weight, not payload capacity.*

The two hooded criminals were perplexed. When you get a manual for a flying machine, you have to read everything! In the end, the escape attempt did take place anyway. Daniel made the trip with a hooded guy pressing his Kalashnikov against his temple. As the onboard lighting was being modified, it was not working. He had to fly with a flashlight between his teeth. But at the moment of takeoff, two inmates tried to play Belmondo and clung to the front of the left skid. The machine, moving along the ground, immediately somersaulted. One of the criminals had his leg severed. Daniel went through the rotor. He was lucky not to be hit by the blades and fainted. One of the inmates managed to escape by taking guards hostage. The man is dangerous, already sentenced to life imprisonment. If the police find him, there will be no warnings. In any case, he has already seriously injured one of them.

With his shoulder completely wrecked, Daniel remained lying in the prison yard. He was not taken to a hospital until three hours later, and it was the inmates who brought him coffee. At the hospital, the Belgian doctors on duty saw nothing on the X-rays.

- Come on, it will all get better with a bit of physiotherapy.

Error, he had two severed tendons and an avulsion fracture. He went to have surgery in Paris, at Val de Grâce, with a guy who is used to the traumas of car racers. When he has recovered, we may fly again. In the meantime, I have started a new comic strip, on navigation in antiquity.

I came across a book on sale. It's called Liners, Könemann publisher. I found lots of photos of the Mauretania in it, on which I had crossed the Atlantic, on the way over. We are going to have a little fun before tackling the world's troubles.

The Mauretania

On these transatlantic cruises, which lasted a little less than a week, there was not much to do but try to chase skirts. I remember that among the French passengers there was a guy who looked like François Périer. I asked him why he was going to the States:

- Look at my face. In France, with women, I don't stand a chance. But in the USA, if a woman learns that you are French, she falls into your arms immediately, simply thinking of Louis Jourdan.

On this outbound crossing, we hardly saw any attractive skirts. The ship, having left Le Havre, was to stop at Cork, in Ireland. At that time, large liners of this kind could take on an additional batch of passengers without stopping in port. The photo below shows a shuttle boat approaching the Mauretania, which immediately gives an idea of its dimensions. It was one of the largest ships of the time.

A shuttle boat, leaving an English port, approaching the Mauretania

We were supposed to embark two hundred additional passengers. All the young rascals on board were scrutinizing the approaching boat. On its deck, we could only see a large black spot. In fact, it was a group of clergymen and nuns who were going to New York for a congress.

The Mauretania, at its launch:

The Mauretania at its launch

One can clearly see that at the moment of launch, the ship slides on a flat support. In fact, very large ships have form stability. They float flat on the sea like shoeboxes. One can clearly see this completely flat bottom, during construction:

Thus, these boats are not ballasted, or very little, by the engines, the fuel. The corollary is that if they heel more than 45°, they capsize. I made the return trip on a French Line ship, of the same size, on its last voyage.

A ghost of the French Line

This 300-meter-long unit was going to be sold to the Japanese to be converted into a hotel. It was its last voyage and it almost became mine too. It was October 1961. It is storm season in the Atlantic. And there we caught a good one, with waves thirty meters high. There were 500 passengers, which means the ship was half empty. The first classes were deserted. Wealthy people preferred to travel by plane, on the four-engine "Constellations". Most people were seasick. At meal times, there were not twenty people seated in the dining room. The waiters were leaning. Many people were leaning. I remember a violinist who leaned alternately to the right and to the left. The "tourist class" lounge was at the front, which meant that with each wave crest, the bow rose and fell thirty meters. On the rise, the acceleration prevented drinkers from bringing their glasses to their lips. But on the descent, those who did not take care got drenched on top of their heads.

I found the spectacle of this storm fascinating. The sea was completely white with foam. One night I wanted to see the raging sea closer up. In the photo above, one can clearly see that at the rear there is a succession of decks. The one closest to the water is the working deck, with winches taller than a man. I took the stairs. Arrived in front of the door leading to this working deck, I saw an inscription "passengers prohibited". Well, I was 22 years old, I went ahead anyway. The spectacle was fascinating. One could see real mountains of black water rearing up. Suddenly I realized that one of them was going to invade the deck I was on. Lucky me, I reacted immediately, rushing towards the riveted metal door, closing it behind me. I heard the impact of the wave. If I had stayed on the other side, the water would have gently lifted me off the deck and a few seconds later I would have seen the liner sailing away. I must have a guardian angel, employed full-time with a goofball like me.

But that was not to be the craziest episode of this return crossing. The wind was hitting us from the rear quarter, at an angle of about thirty degrees. The wavelength of the waves, from crest to crest, was of the same order of magnitude as the length of the ship. Thus, the ship climbed liquid mountains three hundred meters long and thirty meters high. Then it came down surfing on them. Everyone who has sailed knows this. I spent most of my days on the practically deserted deck, breathing in the spray and watching the sea, whitened to infinity. Suddenly something astonishing happened. The ship entered resonance. All ships have a natural frequency of oscillation in roll. A ship like the one I was sailing on had a natural period of oscillation amounting to tens of seconds. Chance made it that the roll excitation corresponding to crossing the waves suddenly fell very close to this value. Do the calculation. These liners sailed at 45 km/h, that is to say twelve meters per second. It therefore took them 25 seconds to climb, at an angle of 30 degrees, waves of 30 meters, which succeeded one another.

The ship began to oscillate, slowly. The movement amplified. There were six or seven oscillations. According to the logbook, the angle of heel during the last oscillation reached 38°. At 45° the ship would capsize. We were two, on the immense aft deck, with the wooden floor. I was clinging to the railing. Tens of meters from me, a passenger was on a deck chair, which was tied to this railing with a rope. The rope broke and he crossed the deck before my eyes, like a rocket. Fortunately, on these liners, the railings are quite high and he did not go overboard, having a good scare. The captain decided to turn completely and in the middle of the ocean we set course for Newfoundland ... towards the United States to take the waves head-on this time, with a drier roll excitation, this time far from the critical period. I believe I remember that our zig-zag crossing lasted eleven days. A record. During these oscillations, there were two deaths. A woman fell from her bunk and was killed instantly by fracturing her skull on her washbasin. A steward, carrying a tray and bottles in a transverse corridor, started running and smashed his skull against the bulkhead, at the end of the hallway. I remember that we had all the trouble in the world, with a crew member, to free an old lady who had slipped between the toilet seat and the wall and was unable to extricate herself from this uncomfortable situation. Attracted by her cries, we had to dismantle the door.

There was another incident, quite funny, this time. When there are storms this violent, steel covers are placed over the glass portholes. But in general, this only concerns the lower portholes. During this fantastic heel, the sea burst the porthole of a cabin and the water immediately invaded it, turning it into a swimming pool where a poor passenger began to paddle as best he could.

Memories are like attics one explores with a lamp. It was the discovery of this book that brought these memories to the surface. As a rule, I prefer the present. Adventure is neither a matter of place, nor of age. In this respect, what I am setting up with a few kids old enough to be my sons is quite daring. It is in the style of "be realistic, consider the impossible". Go take a look at this page, it is quite astonishing. In principle, we are going to set up a magnetohydrodynamics laboratory in a garage in Fontenay, on the outskirts of Paris, 1500 meters from the terminus of a metro line. Well, the sixty members of the association and the donors have put 4800 euros in the cash register. The membership fee is free, with a minimum of 10 euros. There are perhaps two thousand others lying around in the GESTO coffers. We already have an Edwards vacuum pump, bought new for 1300 euros in 2007. Julien Geffray, 29 years old, found the various materials we need. A thick Pyrex vacuum bell, a pressure gauge, a power supply. We are going to find ourselves in this garage as we did more than thirty years ago, my accomplice Maurice and I, in the cellars of the Space Astronomy Laboratory in Marseille.

But there is even crazier stuff. We will also set up a circular "model basin" by reusing a kit pool, like those bought in supermarkets, with a simple corrugated plastic circular wall and a "liner". We will fill all this with acidulated water. In the middle, we will put a pylon, weighted down with cinder blocks, carrying a rotating arm at the end of which we can fix models of MHD hydrofoils, powered by low voltage from car batteries, attached to the rotating crew.

See http://www.savoir-sans-frontieres.com/JPP/telechargeables/Francais/mur_silence.htm (1983). More precisely, page 45.

This link will first take you to the bottom of the aforementioned page, which represents an advertisement (below) placed by DCNS, the organization representing 13,000 employees building ships and weapon systems centered on the sea, as well as French military research in the field of seagoing and underwater vehicles. Thirteen thousand employees who manage a host of subcontractors. It is the entire French naval military industry, including its weapon systems.

The term "analysis of indiscretions linked to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) propulsion" already makes my eyebrows go up in a circumflex. The wording has something absurd about it and suggests that the author of the ad knows nothing about the subject and is going ... fishing (perhaps normal, for sailors?). But you are not at the end of your surprises. Another reader, exploring the DCNS site, found this astonishing ad:

It all begins with a bibliographic analysis. The person writing this ad obviously knows nothing about the subject, is going "fishing". Note the monthly salary offered to this fluid mechanics engineer: from 800 to 1100 euros per month. But the person posting this ad on the DCNS site on behalf of his propulsion department does not exclude that at the end of this six-month contract, all this could conclude with a publication in a conference or in a scientific journal.

A text written by a clown, which highlights the state of decay, of worthlessness of French MHD.

I just got on the phone with a friend who worked in these high-tech spheres - the Navy - and who also thinks that marine propulsion by MHD is in France at near-zero. This is therefore what one should "read" in these ads that look like farces. I am going to recall an anecdote. More than ten years ago, I believe, I had participated in Cadarache in an international MHD congress. Lucky me, it was twenty minutes by car from my home. This colloquium was organized by Marbach, an engineer, founder of the PAMIR group (hub for the applications of MHD to Industry and Research).

On site, I was able to hear students of Moreau (MHD in liquid medium, Grenoble) discuss their first works in a "seawater loop". Understand: a closed-circuit channel, set in motion by a linear Faraday accelerator. At the end of the presentation, I stood up and said:

- Have you thought about putting the MHD accelerator outside the submarine?

The guy was dumbfounded. It was in the mid-nineties, I believe. I went to the blackboard and explained the principle of the parietal accelerator. The other, obviously ignorant of this concept, said to me:

*- Where can we ... find information on all this?

• But in my comic strip, The Wall of Silence, page 36 (1983).*

He did not know it. I do not know where they stand now. One has the impression of pedaling (with sailors one should rather say sailing) in the most complete surrealism. It is possible that 25 years after the publication of The Wall of Silence, the French military have not yet understood the interest of MHD propulsion. Other countries have mastered it for a long time. Its corollary is silence. This is what was evoked in the film The Hunt for Red October. We have just learned that Chinese submarines would have wandered under American units, navigating in the Strait of Hormuz, without having been detected. It is not to be excluded that these Chinese submarines, at this phase of their mission, resorted to an MHD propulsion mode. The Chinese are necessarily involved in MHD, if I judge by the enormous surprise that was that of the Westerners in the early eighties when, participating for the first time in an international colloquium, in the United States, they revealed the extent of their research activities in this field. China is the country of secrecy par excellence. Only a very clever person could say where they stand in this field.

For the idler who is in search of the indiscretion of this MHD propulsion, I will recall that it is silent (laminar flows) and that the electromagnetic signature is non-existent, because they are constant fields, intense but of very short range. At a distance equivalent to the distance between the electrodes, the magnetic field created by a parietal accelerator is insignificant.

So know one thing: what will be done in and around this garage in Fontenay, with the few thousand euros sent by sympathizers, will be the sole and unique MHD activity in France. I do not think the situation is better in gas MHD. It would be comical if it were not so sad and so lamentable to the last degree.

There will be no collaboration. We are not pursuing the same goals. The military dream of hypervelocity torpedoes, submarines with MHD propulsion, hypersonic cruise missiles. I don't give a damn about French backwardness in armaments. We, we want to show that UFOs are flying machines. I believe we do not speak the same language, even if the DCNS engineers say, in their video, "working with passion."

This drawing is not just humor. The army systematically messed up my MHD research for 25 years, particularly through the successive interventions of its go-between, the Polytechnicien Gilbert Payan. I think that if one day I were working in this premises and a guy showed up saying:

- My name is So-and-so, I represent the DGA or DCNS.....

I would throw him out on the spot with a kick in the butt. Unless I plunge him into the acidulated water basin, so that he can examine our models more closely.
Jean-Stéphane, 24 years old, one of the team members, proposes to put on the door:

MAKE SCIENCE, NOT WAR

One of my readers has just sent me a poem that I find quite good. You can access it via this link: Reason of State. There is no proper military research, in any country in the world, no more in France than elsewhere. There are only unconscious people, everywhere, dirty brats playing with matches. It is unconsciousness to devote such an important part of state budgets to weapons of all kinds. To understand when this great shift occurred, when research (applied as well as fundamental) and the development of weapons merged into one and the same activity, go read my book Children of the Devil. Why this title? Because, in the code of the research world, the devil is ... the army.

In what follows, we will tackle the horrors of the world. It is so nauseating and abundant that I have chosen to deliver these things to you "in small bites," interspersing moments of distraction, or of dream. For without that, the world in which we live would lead us to despair.

Watch this video presented on Karl Zéro's site. The Taser: source of cardiac arrests, causing delayed heart attacks, capable of creating serious lesions of nerve tissue due to lack of oxygenation linked to the paralysis of cardiac muscles during tetanization. The Taser in prisons, instruments of torture and death by repeated tasing.

Must see: http://leweb2zero.tv/video/impetuoso_684747529835837

In France, 5000 Taser pistols are already equipping the police.

By clicking on this link you can see a video illustrating a new product created by the Taser company. The text accompanying it is:

You are going to see the most technologically advanced projectile ever delivered by a 12-gauge shotgun

From now on, when you see a man equipped with such a weapon, you will not look at him the same way

http://www.taser.com/pages/VideoDetails.aspx?videoid=56

I stop here, because these images make me nauseous. It is the "electric Karcher", to clean bad places, where bad people live. This non-lethal weapon is invading the world despite the protests of human rights leagues. It has already killed 70 people in the United States and it will kill many more, everywhere. I no longer have the link to a video that showed a "Taser party" where men, probably masochists, are tased by their partners. There is another one where we see that the Taser becomes an initiation instrument among the Marines. Sarkozy has already had many police officers equipped with this weapon. Thousands more will equip our ... municipal police. There have already been blunders. In Lyon, a 17-year-old student, an eco-activist, apprehended during a demonstration, pinned to the ground by two plainclothes police officers, calls them "little wimps". They tase her immediately. Tasing is becoming a commonplace episode of the slightest arrest. They tase the driver or female driver arrested for the slightest speeding violation and who has prudently pulled over to the side of the road. They tase the student who challenges an American politician (John Kerry) during a public meeting, while he is already subdued and thrown to the ground by muscular police officers. But the Taser is an instrument of punishment. It is moreover coldly used in this sequence by a female police officer who shoots at the young man, already pinned to the ground. It is "shut up or I tase you!"

Another video, which evokes the misdeeds of the Taser in the USA, shows how this instrument could be used to torture prisoners to death, in a prison (the body of the dead bore the trace of numerous impacts). If readers give me the links, I will add them. Let's say that this page constitutes a sort of "news on the Taser".

The Taser becomes a means of expression for weak, complexed beings, who have found within the police a way to compensate for their feeling of inferiority.

- With my Taser, now, people respect me!

Psychologists would qualify this instrument as a phallic substitute and it is not surprising to see women using them. But read this:

In the following link, the Taser for ladies, sold with Holster.

http://www.taser.com/PRODUCTS/CONSUMERS/Pages/C2.aspx

For those who do not understand English:

I WANT TO BE THE MISTRESS OF MY OWN DESTINY

In today's world, self-confidence implies the necessity of protecting oneself.
For the independent, autonomous woman, the Taser C2 is an effective element of protection that suits all lifestyles.

Another variant:

Translation:

FASHION WITH A BITE

Let this innovative design, with unparalleled performance, of revolutionary style, give you style

What do you bet the company is studying a Taser mobile phone combo?

We are entering "the civilization of the Taser". This Taser phenomenon is only one of the multiple symptoms of the decomposition of our planetary civilization, which is taking on proportions that are difficult to imagine and which I will attempt to evoke on the next page. You will see that one can wonder why immensely rich and powerful people seem no longer able to stop. A man of power should be able to keep a cool head in all circumstances. I have serious doubts about our current president, capable of reacting to a demonstrator's challenge by giving him ... the finger. It is a thug's gesture. Is this "celebrity president" a "thug-president"? I ask myself the question.

Who is Nicolas Sarkozy? What is the exact nature of the links he has woven with the Bush clan, during his stays in the United States? Is he capable of separating his own internal disorders from the conduct of state affairs? Is he up to the task he is supposed to assume? I am afraid that, like so many before him, or those vying for his place, he lacks terribly imagination.

Continuation of this series of pages "The Ship of Fools"

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