Please go read the previous essays and posts concerning the laws of thermodynamics and civilization, then come back and let us know if there’s still anything left to debate.

Or, alternately, you can send me your working perpetual-motion prototype at the following fictitious address:

Randy Morris
P.O. Box 666
Middle-of-nowhere, WY
87654

I will be happy to subject your zero-point energy source to a battery of appropriate tests and post my findings here on FS.

Imagine the glorious possibilities if this claim turns out to be true: no longer will the destruction wreaked by our civilization be constrained by the limited extractive energy sources we now rely upon. With ZERO-POINT ENERGY(tm) we will be able to convert our entire solar system into cheap Taiwanese consumables within a matter of months! INFINITELY FUELED CORPORATE CAPITALISM—YAY!

/sarcasm off

Sorry. I’m not really a mean person, I just wanted to express that it doesn’t matter to me if we suddenly find some inexhaustible energy source—that isn’t our salvation. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done.

Randy

I have a question on the topic of the body-count commonly attributed to Stalin’s rule. Thanks for Cockburn’s article, but I note that it was published in 1989, before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Is there a recommended book and/or articles published since then that takes into account any declassified Soviet documents, but still supports the lower counts described by Cockburn and the sources he discusses? I ask because I’ve seen people claim that recent disclosures from such Soviet documents only reinforces the earlier claims made by Conquest, etc.

As a nurse, I understand the concept of ‘interstitial space.’ It is not real space, per se, but it is a “filler.”
Once the body dies, that space disappears, and, eventually, the water molecules, etc. One is left with naught but a pile of dust. THAT in itself, is miraculous!

Miracles are a fact of life. They said no one would ever fly-they did. And are.

They said we could never accomplish space travel-we did. And still are.

No one believed in electricity-it is now our modern “standard.”

NO one could comprehend radio waves and UHF and VHF and even ELF and VLF. My gosh, they’re invisable! But they are real. Or you wouldn’t have a stereo and a big screen TV! And how about the Internet? 50 years ago, could anyone have envisioned this? No way!

You people are jaded. I have lived almost half a century, and I know of whence I speak. Most discoveries are mocked and disbelieved. Until one sees the results for one’s self.

I could go on and on..the fact is, that if people don’t understand something, they mock it. I am sorry you cannot get your brains around such a complex subject as E=dc2. It is the power of Time itself…and it is a “miracle!’

Only problem, it is being used for evil…just as many of us thought. THIS is why our species is doomed to die out, if we don’t wake up to a better reality and a different way of doing things. The Old Ways are killing us!

Debate that , if you can.

Oh, BTW, I found your website on CLG…whom I have been contacting re: this powerful tool and its possible ramifications for our future. Now I see why I have been ignored.

All the brain power in the World cannot suffice…unless thre is imagination. Without imgination, we are stagnant. And, therefore, doomed.

That is an original concept.

Jewels

Randy

anthropologists have theorised that the cargo cult (and similar phenomena resulting from contact between affluent “civilised” people and pre-imperial people) was a more or less inevitable product of culture shock due to sudden exposure to (apparently) infinite and effortless wealth, plus the “obvious superiority” of the trade goods (stuff which could not be made using the resources and skills of the indigenous people and hence seemed like magic).

this makes me consider that most people in the affluent countries today do not understand the technologies w/which we are surrounded and on which we depend; we cannot reproduce with our own hands and resources the quality or function of the overwhelming glut of goods on show in storefronts and displayed in advertising. somehow it doesn’t surprise me that we should fall prey to cargo-cult thinking, a symptom of the erosion of autarky and the undermining of the meaning of objects and uses. I don’t recollect Marx and Engels discussing the notion of “use-devalue,” or the depressing devaluation of a cherished possession because a new or improved version is being flaunted at us.

I suspect that the mystification of production and the “superiority” of mystified objects produces a sense of helplessness, a loss of autarky and a despair that devalues in our own estimation those things we can produce ourselves — this in turn makes us less valuable and respectworthy in our own estimation, fit not to act or produce or create but only to pray and beg for magical largesse from a mystified system, “the man behind the curtain.”

in other words, at least one element of the cargo cult phenom is not so much intercultural or colonial (though armed might and imperial crime certainly played their part) as industrialism itself vs some core elements of the human experience, i.e. what Veblen calls the “instinct of workman[sic]ship” and Bookchin calls the tradition of usufruct.

Thanks for pointing out the connection here—”The Enduring Myth of Perpetual Motion Machines” is something that was ridiculed over and over by faculty at every school I attended, but nobody ever made the leap to compare that fantasy with the equally absurd fantasy that powers our economic ideology.

Thanks De!

Randy

what amazes me about the perpetual motion / free energy scams is not so much the crankiness of the ideas, but the disturbing fact that our whole economy and economic ideology is based on the same type of magical thinking. they aren’t really cranks — they are right in the mainstream of the culture, just stating the premises a bit more openly and clearly.

I guess Viagra just isn’t enough of a miracle for everyone.

Randy