Author: Dave

I am an experienced freelance graphic artist and sometime canoeist. I feel strongly about the quality of professional work and like sitting by a remote lake on a sun-warmed rock.

Christianity the…

The “not-Christian” rhetoric has got to stop. We keep resorting to this sunny Sunday-school version of Christianity the good. But in order to believe that, you have to discount most of the last 1700 years of organized Christianity’s history.

But from the persecution of Arianism through the crusades and the church standing in the way of every progressive social development, through the hills of dead children in residential schools, to this awful christofascism… this is what religion without secular constraint does. This is what it always did. This is what it will always do.

Most of the Christians most people in the modern west will have ever met, up to a point, were in fact decent secular people in a secular society. They may have affected to be Christians is some airy fairy way, but their behaviour, for instance not persecuting people who were not their in-group, their behaviour was constrained by a secular society, by the separation of church and state. THIS is exactly what was inevitably going to happen when that separation broke down, when religious ideology was once again allowed to govern individual conduct.

You should have known full well this would happen. You were warned. But you wanted to pretend that the whole blood soaked history of Christianity was just a few bad actors. That REAL Christians didn’t do all the horrendous things they in fact either did or facilitated, any time they were ever in political control.

Things are blowing up again.

During the first world war, so many shells (bombs) were fired that they will be picking up the unexploded munitions for centuries. The bombs would fall. The bombed would crawl into their holes and dugouts and wait. And then when the bombs stopped, they would come out and continue to defend their positions.

That is why the “strategy” of shelling positions for hours before a charge of infantry was so futile. That is much of the reason those charges were so ineffective and why so many men died. The futility of the shelling was why the lines so thoroughly stagnated.

During the second world war, campaigns of dropping carpets of bombs certainly reduced cities and people to rubble, but were remarkably ineffective at weakening hardened military and industrial targets which were built to withstand.

In Vietnam endless bombing and defoliation raids had almost no effect on the Viet Cong who, in the end won their war of “liberation,” from United States imperialism.

But hey, I am sure that bombings will 100% accomplish military objectives in world war three. It’s a given.

An old thing about plastic recycling

Reminder: By and large plastic is not recyclable, or at least not recycled. We have technology for reprocessing some plastic. Clean PET, that is pop bottles, thoroughly washed, with the lids and labels removed can be reprocessed into fibres that can be used to make fleece or shoddy tarp fabric or plastic wood. But that process is not ‘recycling’ it does not cycle.

Some clean second generation materials can be reprocessed again into increasingly lower grade materials but inevitably such plastic is headed for the garbage, or the environment. In fact, reprocessing is an important stage in reducing whole plastic items to microplastics as the material is extruded as fibres.

But all of this is moot, since we never built the local facilities to reprocess plastic and instead rely on shipping our plastic garbage to vulnerable developing nations that also do not have the proper facilities to deal with our waste. Slave-wage workers there pick through literal mountains of wind-blown plastic to find economically salvageable bits. And because this is marginally more lucrative than subsistence farming, the local agricultural economy is undermined.

What garbage pickers can’t sell to reprocessing they sell as raw fuel to be burned uncleanly in local industries. Just burned in furnaces. No emission controls.

What should be happening to our plastic is that is should be incinerated locally in waste-to-energy facilities with state of the art emission control. But to do that we would have to build the infrastructure. And to build the infrastructure we would have to admit we have been talking bullshit about plastic recycling for decades.

wind&solar distraction

Where I live, there are many square miles of abandoned industrial properties and indeed many old industrial buildings each with acres of empty roof. Those properties are owned, privately by real people. Now imagine that it was true that you could “make a profit” by installing solar panels, that fundamentally they were a good idea, that they were a worthwhile investment to generate ‘some’ electricity. If that were so, then no one would have to encourage the property owners to install solar. The profit motive would do that.

But that will not happen. Not today, not five years ago when the same argument was being made. Not ten years ago when the same argument was being made. Not fifteen or twenty or twenty five. Because it is NOT economical.

However if you spend that same capital on refurbishing Pickering B. Then you get lots and lots of affordable low-carbon safe clean grid-scale electricity 24/7 for at least several decades.

Germany by the beginning of 2025, in the electricity sector alone, will have spent €520 BILLION on Energiewende. That is fluffy wind&solar projects the first generations of which are already reaching end-of-life. Had they instead put that capital to use building and refurbishing nuclear power plants, they would have depreciated coal in their electricity sector years ago. Instead, coal remains 16% of German energy. Indeed wind&solar in Germany realistically have only replaced low-carbon nuclear. 75% of Germany’s energy still comes from fossil fuels and the hypnotic allure of wind&solar are responsible for that failure.

Women’s washroom

At a mall in Toronto, when it was built, in the hallway with one set of washrooms the men’s washrooms were first and the women’s were further down, so that every woman who went to the women’s had to walk past the opening for the men’s. Then, some men being what they are, incidents occurred, and the washrooms were closed temporarily and switched so that the urinals went down to the end. Then women did not have to walk past the men’s to get to the women’s.

I don’t care about the gender of people I share a washroom with. But it is just dishonest to pretend that, in public, there is no cause for women, generally, to want a washroom that doesn’t have any men in it. Oversimplifying the issue, in the context of historic and ongoing male violence against women is not really that helpful a pretense.

However, I do like to check what I am saying. It has been years since I was in there, so I had a look. Today, according to the map those are all “Shared Access All Gender Washrooms.” There are men’s and women’s washrooms elsewhere in the mall still. And I suspect that for many women, certainly women who have been victims of male violence, the Shared Access All Gender Washrooms are now the men’s and they are gonna have to head over to the food court to use the women’s.

It would be better if people were not so awful.

Unleaded crime rates

I read an article a while back about the disconnect between actual rates of violent crime and people’s perception of it. The reality is that violent crime rates have been steadily decreasing, around the world, since the early 1990s.

Sometimes people have suggested that this is an effect of the decriminalization of abortion, as wanted children have better prospects in life. And while that may have a role in some places, it cannot be the main factor because other countries, for instance Ireland which only decriminalized abortion recently, have seen the same drop in violent crime rates.

Which takes us to a somewhat horrifying alternative explanation. Lead was eliminated from gasoline and therefore exhaust, in the early 1990s. And the correlation suggests that crime rates have fallen because the rates of brain damage from lead poisoning have fallen.

But hey, tolerate the dismantling of the EPA… I’m sure that will work out swell.

Palintiri

We do not have to imagine what harm trusting Palantir’s “Master Database” would make possible. Just look at the Horizon IT scandal. Horizon is/was an accounting software system used by the UK Post Office. The default position was that if Horizon said you had unbalanced accounts, then you were convicted, by Horizon.

Even when the Post Office discovered that Horizon was faulty and they were wrongfully convicting hundreds of sub-postmasters, ruining lives, causing deaths, the Post Office, which was invested in Horizon, they doubled down, continued to prosecute and destroy their innocent employees and engineered an horrendous cover up. And that was just the UK Post Office. They were wrong, but in the beginning at least, they were not trying to be malicious. The tRump administration is objectively malicious.

The last thing anyone with an ounce of sense wants is this kind of comprehensive database tool in the hands of the kakistocracy. It is insane. And it gets worse. Horizon was developed by Fujitsu. Fujitsu, a private company, left back-doors in Horizon, that they could access, presumably for maintenance, that allowed them to mess with and change/fabricate data. They even showed off this capability to people visiting their facilities. The idea that Palantir, named after a weapon of the Enemy, would not be able to fork around with your or anyone’s private data on such a system, is… naive.

Trick question: Which has killed more people, The Chernobyl disaster, or Energiewende?

The Chernobyl disaster, which was terrible for sure, will eventually, over like 70 years, have led to the early mortality of between 4 and 15 thousand people. The “accident” is the poster child for the anti-nuclear. “But what about Chernobyl‽” They scream.

The same people however seem largely unconcerned that German coal-fired generation, which could have been replaced by nuclear by now if they had not pissed away €520 BILLION on Energiewende, has been killing something like 75 thousand people a year, EVERY year, for decades. Instead of fixing that, these same anti-nuclear folks had the country closing nuclear plants and REVERTING to coal.

Closure of the last two German nuclear plants alone, in 2022, was expected to INCREASE the European death toll by about a thousand a year. Meaning that just that one stupid populist political decision, the premature closure, will have killed more people than the world’s worst nuclear disaster some time between next year and 2037.

Meanwhile, pollution from German industry, mostly the energy sector, that could have been largely eliminated by spending that €520 billion on nuclear power, continues to kill between 5–19 times as many people as the world’s worst nuclear accident, EVERY year.

Know one no’s.

People, I swear, know less than they did when I was 30. Too many people function like bedazzled children, gawping at an incomprehensible world, without any rudimentary knowledge with which they could usefully interpret anything, and no hooks with which they could make associations and integrate new learning. Like fElontRump staring at the eclipse. Like everyone repeating nonsense about nuclear power, or wind&solar, Like every anti-choice, every anti-vax, every small-government austerity tax-cut knuckle-dragger.

The clue that this was coming was in people’s “personal” religious beliefs. You meet someone who claims to be a christian, or “spiritual” or some crap. And what you realize is that they have just made up some dip-shitty Frankenstein’s monster of half-baked philosophies/mythologies from some fragmentary misunderstanding of their vague Sunday-school indoctrination. Where they have picked and chosen ideas, with no context, because they “feel right” to them.

And that can never be how knowing stuff works.

Ukraine in 2025

I’m sorta rewriting an older thing here.

There’s this couple, they are Ukrainians who live and work in Belgium. And they have a YouTube channel that follows their restoration of a big century farmhouse.

In 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine (more than they already had between 2014—22) and Marina and Illia’s family in Kharkiv fled before the wave of atrocities.

I am sure the whole family was terrified, as was quite reasonable. Fearing that Putin’s forces would be successful in their intent to overrun and eliminate the state of Ukraine, which is still the intention, the refugees headed to the border.

In a breathtaking modernism that still gets me, fans of the “De Hoeve. Old Belgian farm renovation” channel on Patreon from eastern Europe drove to the border and evacuated the fleeing family, including children, and brought them to safety in Belgium. The Patrons who return your family to you alive, are the top tier I guess.

But this is not really about De Hoeve, or the couple. It is about INVASION. The invasion of Ukraine is real. The Russians are ENTIRELY at fault. This horror cannot end with the bad guys being rewarded with seized territory. It has to end with Russia leaving all of Ukraine. Because they have openly and clearly stated that all of The Ukraine belongs to the Russian Federation and that seizure is inevitable and just.

And if we could possibly learn ANYTHING from history, it ought to be that that imperialist aggression had better be nipped in the bud, rather than at the next boarder or the next. Because in 2022 Russian war machinery had essentially “to Berlin” written on the sides of it. Failing to respond with overwhelming resources has already made this great military fail so much worse than it would have been if we armed Ukraine in 2013 to prevent the seizure of Crimea.

For the sake of all the families, for decades to come, we have to stop Putin.