These strange lost causes
September 6, 2011
One says that truth never triumphs, but that fools always end up dying.
One is willing to believe that. But time passes, which eventually adds up to decades. Yourself, you look at your birth certificate, calculate your age, and say "how many years do I have left to keep fighting for more truth, less lies."
Chese fights only make sense if men and women follow you. Things can only change when a sufficiently large fraction of the population is committed to challenging lies. Otherwise, actions resemble Don Quixote's charges against windmills.
Nour modern windmills, we know them well; they are our media, which lie to us, which numb us, they are our "popular science" magazines, which no longer know what to invent to give the impression that science is progressing, when in fact it... is regressing.
Certainly, I went to the newsstand of the supermarket near my home. On the left, on the display, today's news. On all the magazine covers: Dominique Strauss-Kahn and his billionaire wife, Anne Sinclair. A few days earlier, they were talking about "their ordeal." Now it's "the resurrection."
The employee of this newsstand, noticing my gaze, made this comment:
- You think it amuses me to see this story displayed on all the covers for months!
One says the press numbs people. But if the masses weren't so interested in the Strauss-Kahn affair, the magazines wouldn't have made it their cover story for months. They do it because the dossier is
sellable.
This story also diverts people's interest towards the trivial, so that the little interest they have is not captured by important matters. In short, they are being misinformed.
Idon't know whether one should be optimistic or pessimistic in the face of what we see developing in the world. Of course, without the Internet, we would be completely misinformed. Misinformation through the media is not new. It has always existed, and it would be naive to think it is not a strong component of contemporary political action.
Iwill cite the way Hitler managed to invade Poland with the massive support of the German population.
You may know that after the 1914-18 conflict, the center of Europe underwent a complete redrawing. The south of Germany (the Sudetenland), a border region with the south of Poland, had a significant Polish population. To the east of this region, there was a radio station broadcasting its programs using a tall wooden tower (which remains the tallest wooden tower in Europe).
The Gleiwitz Tower, key to the Nazi invasion of Poland
The Nazis staged a disinformation operation by dressing prisoners in Polish uniforms. These men, drugged, were taken to the site and then shot. The dead don't talk, as is well known. The German press then spread the news that a group of Polish extremists had seized the Gleiwitz transmitter, and was about to broadcast a radio message inciting the Sudeten Germans to revolt against the Nazi regime and overthrow Hitler. National Socialism was in danger. See "the Himmler operation." Hitler then found the pretext to launch "a defensive operation against the threats that the Polish state was posing to Germany." And all the Germans believed it.
Adrawing that could have just as well illustrated the September issue of Science et Vie
Ihad started writing a book recounting many stories of this kind. But I eventually left the manuscript aside, seeing the failure of the publication of "L'ambre et le Verre" (sales, now: less than one copy per day!).
Today, what is true, what is false? Where is the boundary between popular movements and manipulation by foreign powers? Few could say. We live in an amazing time. A lot is happening around the world. Many things happen in complete indifference.
Ihave just spoken with a couple returning from Japan. She is Japanese. Nothing new in the East. The entire Japanese population is anesthetized. The Fukushima disaster is practically forgotten, repressed, hidden. There is a simple reason: this region, called Tohoku, which represents the entire northeast of Japan, is "the country's vegetable garden." It is also impossible to move a city like Fukushima (300,000 inhabitants), nor even to deal with the contaminated land.
The diameter of the tank is five and a half meters. These holes are therefore of an impressive diameter. But this is normal because the "control rods" are actually cruciform structures made of two crossed planes. This structure, a real sieve, indicates that if the corium manages to penetrate the bottom of the cube, the entire structure could collapse.
This story struck me deeply, and it decided me to enter the anti-nuclear struggle with all my knowledge and talents. There is on my site what I had already put there. But in recent months, a lot has happened. I have read thousands of pages of documents, theses, articles. And this has strengthened my conviction. We must get out of nuclear energy as soon as possible, which involves the development of renewable energy on a large scale. It has become simply
A question of human species survival
With a group of engineers, we will compose a book on the subject, which will be sold in benefit of the association Science and Culture for All. This money, from the French version, will allow the book to be translated into multiple languages, whose pdfs will then be available for free download on the website of Savoir sans Frontières. Too many people know too little about so many things, in all these fields.
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Nuclear energy is madness. The waste problem is unsolvable. As engineer Bernard Laponche wrote, a major nuclear accident in Europe is inevitable if we continue like this. Just read this week's Canard Enchaîné to see how Bouygues is managing the concrete pouring in the EPR of Flamanville. Surreal.
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There are many alternative solutions, which go far beyond "a small solar water heater on your roof" (although these individual actions are far from negligible).
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The ITER project is an unimaginable waste, an unthinkable farce, a lie, a misappropriation of public funds on a global scale. The project itself has a mass of defects that the public is unaware of, or has been made to ignore, by presenting a beautiful pink plasma, calmly contained by a powerful magnetic field. The reality is quite different, and, fortunately, I have the scientific skills (MHD) to process these complex files, identifying the numerous weak points, and I have gathered the documents that support my claims: explosions of superconducting magnetic systems, "lightning strikes" in these tokamaks, vaporizing the wall at the point of impact of these high-energy electron discharges (10 to 40 MeV), at an intensity of a million amperes (JET, Tore Supra). In the future ITER, the instabilities, still as unmanageable, will give rise to...