Written by Dan Cohen . Originally published on MintPress
Since the Russian offensive inside Ukraine commenced on February 24, the Ukrainian military has cultivated the image of a plucky little army standing up to the Russian Goliath.
To bolster the perception of Ukrainian military mettle, Kiev has churned out a steady stream of sophisticated propaganda aimed at stirring public and official support from Western countries.
The campaign includes language guides, key messages, and hundreds of propaganda posters, some of which contain fascist imagery and even praise Neo-Nazi leaders.
In Ukraine itself all media is heavily censored, self censored or closed down, with opposition leaders imprisoned, all 11 opposition parties banned and the Russian language, spoken by a third of the population, being forbidden.Popular TV personalities have stooped to recommending killing Russian children and castrating Russian prisoners of war.
In this atmosphere, far from Putin’s goal of ‘denazification’, propaganda lies are firmly believed, even when proven false. For instance the tale of the heroic fighter pilot downing 4 Russian jets in a day, and the ‘massacres’ in the hospital and theatre of Mariupol, after repeated proof they were False Flag spectacles of the Azov nazi occupiers are still presented again as Russian atrocities.
Behind Ukraine’s public relations effort is an army of foreign political strategists, Washington DC lobbyists, and a network of intelligence-linked media outlets.
Ukraine’s propaganda strategy earned it praise from a NATO commander who told the Washington Post, “They are really excellent in stratcom — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.”
The Post ultimately conceded that “Western officials say that while they cannot independently verify much of the information that Kyiv puts out about the evolving battlefield situation, including casualty figures for both sides, it nonetheless represents highly effective stratcom.”
Feel the Heat: Paul Woskov of MIT holds water-cooling lines leading to a test chamber, and a sample of rock with a hole made by a beam from a gyrotron. Photo: Paul Rivenberg/MIT
In just 2 years the first Deep-Geo wells will be drilled. With new millimeter technology rocks can be vaporized in a self sealing borehole up to 20kms deep.
It’s not toxic, reaches only the hot rocks well before magma, and doesn’t fracture or poison ground water like fracking.
And you can do it almost anywhere.. that is: right next to redundant coal, oil and gas power stations, supplying the super heated steam to power their turbines, without oil, gas coal or nuclear.. 100% CO2 free! (unless we include CO2 released in the manufacture of the drilling equipment)
We live on a piece that fell off the sun. Just 20kms down the rocks are at 500 C. All we need to do is drill down, pump in water and use superheated steam for free electricity lasting millions of years.
Problems:
Deep-Geo is not fully demonstrated yet.
It’s happening in the US where the oil/gas lobby may try to stop it.
It won’t end capitalism, though if it goes viral worldwide it could slow down the Climate Catastrophe, though ecocide would continue.
The challenge for Activists against Climate Meltdown is to evaluate the reality of the Deep-Geo promise and, if it really works as promised, to support and demand it, while continuing to campaign against ongoing Capitalist Ecocide and Biosphere collapse.
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The Perfect Energy Source Is Already Here – Endless Geothermal Is Poised for Release From Deep in the Earth
The base of the new drilling method was discovered ‘accidentally’ by Paul Woskov and his team and developed for 10 years at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center before various companies began trials.
As physicists work in the nuclear fusion sector, they inadvertently invented a tool that could allow geothermal plants to deliver limitless clean energy by harnessing the power of the Earth.
That tool is a large millimeter-wave laser drill that will allow engineers to bore down more than 12.4 miles (20 km) into the Earth’s crust to harness the heat from the planet’s core.
This laser drilling technology is being pioneered by a spin-off company called Quaise from MIT .
A plasma drill made by Slovakian company GA Drilling.“The millimetre-wave beam does not rotate so the shape of the beam will determine the shape of the borehole cross section,” says Woskov. “By using circular or elliptical shaped launch waveguides we have produced circular and elliptical holes in basalt in the laboratory. “Using an elliptical-shaped bore hole aligned with the asymmetric subsurface stresses will increase the collapse strength of a borehole by factors of 10 or more.” https://safetowork.com.au/a-revolutionary-approach-to-drilling/
The bottom line is that this idea is not science fiction, and Quaise has the money to put several full-scale demonstration machines into action by 2024, and hopes to have a 100- megawatt supercritical geothermal plant in operation by 2026.
At 12.4 miles into the Earth’s crust, temperatures soar to 500°C, a sector-redefining level compared to traditional drill bit borehole temperatures of around 200°C. At this stage and depth, water under the ground becomes “supercritical,” a state of matter where it’s neither a gas nor a liquid.
“A power plant that uses supercritical water as the working fluid can extract up to 10 times more useful energy from each drop when compared to non-supercritical plants,” a spokesperson from Quaise told New Atlas. “Aiming for supercritical conditions is key to attaining power densities consistent with fossil fuels.”
A recycling masterclass
It’s perhaps ironic that humans would seek to harness the energy of the sun and stars in a nuclear fusion reactor when there is 20 billion times more heat under our feet than the entire world’s energy consumption. Merely 0.03% of global energy is delivered from geothermal despite this richness.
A virtually limitless supply of energy exists in the form of this supercritical fluid snaking its way through the crust and mantle of the planet, and just 0.01% of it would provide far more wattage than the world uses.
In order to reach it though, we need better drilling technology, and Quaise is taking advantage of the work put into a 1970s piece of technology called a gyrotron.
When needing to heat water into a plasma at the heart of a nuclear fusion reactor, scientists need to generate between 90-150 million degrees Celsius of heat. This has been done by both lasers and super magnets.
The gyrotron is one of those lasers, and it generates electromagnetic waves in the millimeter-wave spectrum, shorter than microwaves and longer than infrared or visible light. Designed, invented, and tested in the USSR, the device is excellent at rapidly heating up a plasma without substantial energy usage.
So, accessing already existing energy with already existing technology, Quaise has proved itself remarkably efficient. They’ve raised $63 million in funding and they’re looking to cut out fossil fuels in a real way before the end of the decade.
Their next planned step may be the greatest recycling trick in the industry.
As coal-fired power plants continue to be shuttered around the world, their giant, already established infrastructure for converting steam into electricity, large electricity distribution equipment, and talented workforce could simply be taken over by Quaise, who could merely replace the coal-fired components with those meant for harnessing supercritical water.
Pure futurism
“There are somewhere upwards of 8,500 coal-fired power plants around the world, totaling over 2,000 gigawatts of capacity, and they’ll all have to find something else to do by 2050,” writes Loz Blain at New Atlas.
Blain argues this is more revolutionary than nuclear fusion, and the beauty of the design, if it works, is that the technology originally made for fusion reactors could end up putting them out of a job.
At 12-15 miles below the Earth’s surface, it doesn’t matter where the drill or ex-coal plant is located, the heat will be pretty much the same.
In fact, the world would be set for a paradigm shift.
Since unlimited clean energy could be obtained within most nations, it would untether them from geo-political concerns about oil-rich countries like the US and their human rights abuses.
On land and sea, birds and wildlife would be untouched by any massive polluting oil spills that would become a thing of the past.
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The challenge for activists against Climate Meltdown is to evaluate the reality of the Deep-Geo promise and if it really works to support and demand it, while continuing to campaign against ongoing Capitalist Ecocide and Biosphere collapse.
It’s so surreal how we’re closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it’s only continuing to escalate, and yet hardly anyone seems to notice and almost everyone is just going about their lives thinking their usual thoughts and having their usual conversations.
Vladimir Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert and has issued threats of nuclear retaliation should western powers try to intervene in Russian military operations in Ukraine. The Biden administration’s first Nuclear Posture Review will be out soon and will likely mirror the changes in Russia’s nuclear posture in some ways.
The probability is skyrocketing of a mass extinction event which could easily block out the sun for years and starve everyone to death who isn’t lucky enough to be killed quickly in the…
Since 2001, the collectively-run website Antijob.net has provided a “blacklist of employers,” offering a space for laborers in Russia to report on their negative experiences at work.
As Russian media and labor organizing have come under increasing pressure, Antijob continues to provide a crucial resource for ordinary employees, even in an extremely repressive environment.
Russian corporations and government agencies have repeatedly attempted to bribe the publishers or suppress the site, without success.
The so-called “Great Resignation” and a popular Antiwork Reddit site have recently made waves in the United States; we conducted the following interview with Antijob to learn what anti-work agitation looks like in Russia.
Antijob has also played a role in supporting protests against the invasion of Ukraine, informing Russian workers of their legal rights on the job if they arrested while protesting.
As appendixes, we’ve included the Antijob manifesto, the Antijob statement against the invasion of Ukraine, and some examples of the reports workers publish on the site.
“Blacklist of employers—Antijob.net. Add yours.”
“Remember and tell others: your interests are opposed to the interests of the employer. This is a struggle that has been going on for centuries. The struggle between those who are trying to make a living and those who want to buy a new yacht.”
NATO leaders have decided to significantly increase defense spending, it was announced after the meeting in Brussels.
The powers of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg have been extended until September 30, 2023.
NATO leaders agreed to strengthen the alliance’s eastern wing by deploying four battle groups in Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia.
“We will have more troops on the east wing, we will have more planes in the air, and we will have ships, navy and submarines at sea.”
Stoltenberg said that they agreed to increase aid to Ukraine.
“Today, we agreed to support Ukraine in cyberspace to protect it from attacks, chemical, radiological and others. We are ready to do everything to help Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said.
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“Working together, we must work to ensure Bosnia and Herzegovina, its security and independence.”
Durante el verano del 2019 dos personas fueron agredidas de forma sádica y violenta por los agentes municipales al Raval, dicha actuación brutal, desproporcionada y abusiva, no es ninguna novedad, es algo habitual en su manera de comportarse.
En este barrio es frecuente que se den este tipo de actuaciones y los agresores son casi siempre los mismos, los defensores de la ley y el orden. Basan sus actuaciones en la fuerza física, numérica y las armes… sus razones y argumentos; la prepotencia, el abuso de poder y la violencia gratuita.
En muchos de estos comportamientos hay un componente ideológico y un plus de violencia, según tu opción y gustos sexuales, sentimiento de género, clase social, económica, color de piel, ideología, procedencia… hay veces que se les va la pinza y producen graves lesiones y muertes.
Como siempre si la opinión pública se hace eco y tienen un proceso judicial…
We have all seen the pictures on TV and social media. We have heard the reports on our radios. We know what’s going on in the Ukraine. And we know what’s happening at the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary & Romania. As anti-authoritarians, anarchists and anti fascists in the UK we need to show our solidarity. Let’s put aside our differences and support comrades in Ukraine and those on the borders giving active solidarity.
There are presently anarchists and anti capitalists in Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine, who are setting up anti-authoritarian resistance committees.
After speaking to comrades in the area we know there are people in neighbouring countries trying to get equipment to them.
Speaking to other anarchists outside the Ukraine we also know comrades are doing a lot of support work at the borders as refuges leave Ukraine.
