Monthly Archives: March 2021

Turbo Encabulator Direct Air Capture of CO2

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So far, I have resisted invoking the Turbo Encabulator when writing about Climate Change, because I wanted to simplify the argument being advanced in favor of decarbonizing civilization. But, perhaps that was a mistake, and I should have had more faith in the public being able to appreciate a technically focused presentation.

I realize now that it is essential for the public to know that Direct Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide by Turbo Encabulator Extractive Gaseous Reemulsificative Processing by Catalytic Diplexification is THE ONLY method of decycling the accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxides, as well as the engorged oceanic plastic waste and bioaccumulative microparticulate inclusions of the biodiverse infundibuluum.

I will begin drafting a brief forty-one page extract for anticipatory publication in the immediate distant future. Be on the lookout for that.

For the basics on Turbo Encabulator technology, see the following instructional videos:

Technical Jargon Overload
https://youtu.be/aW2LvQUcwqc

“Turbo Encabulator” the Original (well, almost)
https://youtu.be/Ac7G7xOG2Ag

The History of the Turbo Encabulator
https://youtu.be/kkH20fNavoI

Chrysler Turbo Encabulator
https://youtu.be/MXW0bx_Ooq4

Introducing the innovative new Micro Encabulator™
https://youtu.be/u4ILnWpi8XY

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Six Moody Reflections on America in Spring 2021

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ONE

“I can’t remember the exact date, but the most mind blowing moment of my life was when after an exhaustive turning over of every rock imaginable, I realized there is no energy source which will allow us to continue our daily activities at the level Westerners have become accustomed to without the world and life as we know it being destroyed in the process….And once you accept that fact, that my friends is when you have reached the intellectual point of no return in your mindset as far as the inevitability of collapse…” — Forrest Palmer

My answer to Forrest Palmer:

Collapse is only inevitable by choice, and only if civilization is defined as being the present Western-Capitalist paradigm. There are no PHYSICAL limitations to fashioning a comfortable, equitable, intelligent, culturally rich, and ecologically harmonious (which is more than merely sustainable) world civilization. All the barriers are literally mental, and literally failures of personal moral character.

I agree that looking at human history and our world today, it seems “impossible” to ever achieve the global consensus necessary to realize that new hypothetical paradigm. But, from the Universe’s perspective, it is entirely possible if we humans can summon the collective will to do so.

TWO

Most people dislike truth because it is inconvenient, discredits their cherished biases, and illuminates responsibilities they want to avoid. And that is why the 1st Amendment is the least liked and most opposed of all of them. The first thing a corporation or government agency wants you to sign away, when they buy you, is your 1st Amendment rights.

In the U.S. “commerce” and “public service” aim to kill the 1st Amendment, with the exception of by a few principled people. You have the “right” to express yourself, but if somebody else fears what you say or write, because of their insecurity and dishonesty, then they want you silenced and unemployed, or dead. Look at Julian Assange.

THREE

Is This The End Of Forests As We’ve Known Them?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/10/is-this-the-end-of-forests-as-weve-known-them

“Is this the end of forests as we’ve know them?” It depends on who the “we” is. For the “we” that is intimately connected with the natural world, it may seem like the inevitable outcome from continuing human-species existence.

But most people today, particularly in the high carbon-spewing countries, do not have any real connection to “nature”; they don’t see and don’t notice the subtlety of its cyclic changes, nor the relentlessness of its ‘permanent’ changes; they just notice immediate effects on themselves, as obstacles to their wants (or needs for the poorest).

Most Americans are urbanites or suburbanites (no undisturbed nature there), or rural exploiters of “nature”; far fewer are sensitively connected to the land and its wildlife. The social and mental inertia of the unseeing and uncaring (and worldwide) majority is why the minority nature-loving “we” — which includes materially advantaged people with the luxury to be nature lovers — is seeing Paradise wither and burn away.

Awakening that vast self-focused ‘public mind’ to an actual commitment to fundamentally alter the physical routines of its existence, and swallow the economics necessary to do so, is the fundamental challenge — and probably an impossibility — of “climate change activists” (i.e., climate anti-change activists). It is easy enough to point out this and that current instance of environmental and biodiversity loss and/or collapse, and it is easy enough to say “capitalism must die for the world to live,” but none of that has had any impact on the vast public mind, as should be evident by now, and safe to say never will.

So, what if anything will? What ideas can be injected into the public arena that gain wide public attention — which means they have to suggest immediate improvements in the economic lives of the demos — and are sufficiently motivating to create significant physical+electoral actions by the public to really begin changing public/corporate/government institutions, for the ultimate near-term purpose of de-carbonizing civilization?

I find it easy to generalize, I find it incredibly difficult to think up a detailed “plan.” Exhortation alone will never be effective, organization is the key, but organization is very, very slow and, climatically, time is very short for implementing the massive alterations that are really needed.

What are the practical (a.k.a., ideologically ‘imperfect’) steps that we (the big “we”, in the public) as individuals can take — variously in our many different constituencies, regions and countries — to spur our governments to respond as promptly and effectively as possible to climate change as the emergency it really is? Doomism is not an acceptable response.

FOUR

DAC = Direct Air Capture of CO2 is hypothetical technology — an illusion — promoted by the oil industry so they can keep drilling out oil for us all to burn or turn into plastic waste. DAC is a sham in the same way that plastic recycling is a sham for allowing the continuation of oil/plastic companies’s profiteering at Earth’s expense. Only about 9% of all plastic waste is recycled, the rest is a growing mass of pollution poisoning our rivers, oceans, lands, foods and bodies. The only plastics with any possibility of being reprocessed for reuse are those labeled 1 and 2, and maybe also 5.

The fallacy of DAC is like trying to design a better helmet that allows you continue playing Russian Roulette. The obvious — surest, quickest, cheapest — solution to the problem is to just stop. And so it is with the production of CO2 and plastics. My physics analysis of DAC is given in these two articles.

The Improbability of CO2 Removal from the Atmosphere
9 August 2020
https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-co2-removal-from-the-atmosphere/

Stream Tube CO2 Removal Machine
8 August 2020
https://manuelgarciajr.files.wordpress.com/2020/08/stream-tube-co2-removal-machine.pdf

FIVE

On 27 October 1962, Vasili Arkhipov single handedly prevented the launching a nuclear war between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., by doggedly refusing to allow for the launching of a nuclear warhead torpedo against an American warship relentlessly depth charging his Russian submarine for five hours, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It took three senior officers on the submarine each with an individual key all needed in unison to enable the launch mechanism. Everyone else on that submarine favored the torpedo counterattack because they feared they were on the brink of being sunk. Vasili Arkhipov alone dissented, and that prevented the launching of nuclear weapons, and inevitably an intercontinental nuclear war.

The Man Who Saved The World, Vasili Arkhipov
https://youtu.be/iQYC6OlwC5k

The history of the Cuban Missile Crisis – Matthew A. Jordan
https://youtu.be/bwWW3sbk4EU

Vasili Arkhipov, 2017 Future of Life Award winner for averting nuclear war
https://youtu.be/iLokpu4ixQE

Preventing nuclear war, ending all war, really facing global heating worldwide and equitably right away and persistently ever after, which all mean ending poverty and hunger and disease and suffering and ecocide worldwide are the challenges and obligations we face today. We all need to become Arkhipovs confronting those challenges.

I think I’ll remember every 27 October as “Arkhipov Day,” or Human Solidarity Day.

SIX

Stan Goff wrote: “In my early childhood, we had duck-and-cover drills. As I reach the sunset of this life, we have active-shooter drills. God bless America.”

That prompted these thoughts of mine:

For me the worst such moment was 22 October 1962, watching JFK on TV during the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis. My parents were glued to the B&W TV in our New York apartment, and I was glued to them watching that TV (I was 12). We didn’t know if Khrushchev would incinerate us in NYC with Russian nuclear-tipped ICMBs before or after JFK incinerated my grandparents in Havana with US nuclear-tipped ICBMs. We didn’t care about Moscow at that point. Fortunately, both Arkhipov and Khrushchev felt a greater connection to humanity than did Kennedy, because of their (all 3) searing memories of WWII losses, and defused the standoff at the Nuclear OK Corral.

So, I was free thereafter to pursue my boyish dreams in the sunny 60s and 70s, only limited by my degree of perseverance (high), relatively modest talents, political naïveté, the Vietnam War draft (dodged a bullet there), the Glass Ceiling protecting White Supremacy (the Prime Directive, as I found out), and the randomness of luck and lucklessness (can’t complain too much here).

When I saw families with naked children begging in the streets of Havana, in June 1959, I became viscerally aware that there were many people undeservingly much worse off that I was, and I have never lost that feeling. And over time my rage against authority (and against people in general when I’m at my glummest) has only grown because they continue to allow that to continue, and even worsen in many places — which I know is entirely unnecessary — and all because of selfishness: bigotry and greed.

As I look toward the sunset of my life, I just hope to love my family and delight them, amuse my few friends on occasion, enjoy health and art as long as I’m able, and forgive myself for my own degree of selfishness (which I know I am not going to relinquish) and for my amateurish ineffectiveness (and, frankly, laziness) at prompting any significant social improvements. In brief: my human imperfection.

My legacy is imprinted on the wind, and as the fleeting memories held by a few I hold dear. My message to the world: have fun, and be kind.

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A Simple Explanation of Black Holes

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A Simple Explanation of Black Holes

Louis N. Proyect:

I was trying to follow a one-hour lecture on Black Holes [podcast] but gave up after fifteen minutes and switched to Jay Leno’s garage to hear what he had to say about the 1955 Packard Caribbean.

Manuel García, Jr.:

Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” is a pretty good book about it, for the general public.

Theoretically, Black Holes are a consequence of Einstein’s General Relativity (the effect of gravity on space-time): with enough concentrated mass, and insufficient thermal-nuclear energy generation (a star uses up its “fuel”) to keep that mass puffed out, its mutual gravity draws it into a spherical center, and since mass-gravity “curves” space-time (an effect that diminishes with radial distance from the center) and since space-time curvature is expressed/observed as the bending of light rays; at a particular radial distance (the Schwarzschild Radius) light rays are curved completely by 360 degrees – into circles.

Light emitted and/or passing by a Black Hole outside the SR is bent (by quite a bit but less than 360 degrees close to the SR, and less so with increasing distance from the SR). Light emitted at distances less than the SR are infinitely bent (curly cues), and never travel beyond the SR – they are trapped. Hence “Black Holes” because no light is emitted from them.

Black Holes can be detected by measuring how light rays from a known distance source are bent on passing (outside the SR) near a Black Hole. When Quantum Mechanics is added to the theoretical description of Black Holes, then more odd possibilities arise having to do with matter popping into and out of existence in the vicinity of the SR, but somehow entangled with mirror quantum interactions inside the Black Hole, and from that Hawking proposed ways for gaining information from inside a Black Hole despite the barrier to (non quantum)) information flow, by the SR.

Hawking also presented a theory that such “quantum flickering” (my term, here) could lead to Black Holes steadily ‘evaporating’ into non-existence; analogous to a soap bubble popping. Hawking’s way of describing it for the public is, naturally, very good; but the math behind it all is massively complicated and above my pay grade.

Louis N. Proyect:

I can’t wrap my head around space-time. When I go to the CVS across the street, it takes about 3 minutes. How can a Manhattan avenue and the time it takes to cross it occupy the same continuum?

Manuel García, Jr.:

Think of it this way, first in 2 space dimensions: imagine a checkerboard of grid lines for length and width, and their intersections “define” points in space, or locations. Maritime navigation uses this idea, where the 2D surface happens to be the surface of a sphere (latitude, longitude).

Now, at any single location (say, your desert island) time proceeds forward from a past to a future (you are always in a “now” that is the experienced part of this ‘perpetual’ stream). So now we imagine our checkerboard having vertical “time lines” piercing the horizontal spatial (2D) plane at each “location.”

Hence, the complete description of the 3D space-time of every location is defined by its x and y coordinates (spatial coordinates, like latitude and longitude) PLUS a time coordinate, t, noting the ‘time” point of whatever event is being denoted for location x-y (e.g., your 70th birthday on your desert island).

George Pal’s 1960 movie of H.G.Wells’ “The Time Machine” presented a beautiful description and use of this concept: the Time Machine could go into the past or the future but always fixed to one spot on Earth.

Now, given our actual (or perceived) 3D spatial world, we then exist in a 4D space-time. It is just impossible to draw a visual image of a 4D grid in the 3D space we experience, or on our 2D papers and art pads. But mathematics can describe 4D with exactitude (as multi-dimensional geometry, and with tensor mathematics).

Now for curvature. If you use a checkerboard quilt as a bedspread (to lay out an x-y grid of straight lines (called a Euclidian Space or Euclidian Geometry) and then place a bowling ball in the middle of it, the quilt will be deformed by the weight of the ball (gravity) and the grid lines near the ball will appear curved — because the originally flat surface they were defined in has been warped out of its original “2D-ness.”

That warping of the originally flat surface has a funnel shape: no warping (which is “down”) far away, and increasing warping as one gets closer to the bowling ball. If you now imagine a 2D (spatial) Black Hole, the funneling becomes increasingly vertical (“plunging”) on approach to the SR until it becomes perfectly vertical at the SR.

So, as light rays are in fact the grid lines forced to remain on the spatial surface, however it is warped, then the grid line at the infinite bottom of the funnel (which occurs at the SR) is a perfect circle, and can never “climb out.”

So now, for 3D space it is impossible to draw gravity-induced warping of space-time (which is 4D: 3 space dimensions, 1 time dimension), but the idea is exactly as described above.

To add more fun to it all, by Einstein’s General Relativity, the curving of light rays is equivalent to a slowing of them (analogous to taking your sports into a curve after racing down the Mulsanne Straight). So, with infinite curvature (the situation at the SR) time becomes infinite: or “stops.” Light rays at or below the SR are in “suspended animation” or “eternity,” they are stuck forever.

Lots of science fiction is based on the idea of the “light cones” centered on the “time axis” piercing our spatial here-and-now, coming to our specific (x,y,z,t) out of the past (“history”), narrowing down from the totality of events of the distant past to the single moment-spot of our specific here-now (x,y,z,t); and projecting into the future with an expanding range of possibilities as one projects into the more distant future.

It is easy enough to find images (sketch representations, cartoons, videos) on the internet of this light-cone limitation of the possible causes of this here-now, and its range of possible future effects.

BTW, the “grid lines” in “surfaces” (forming the coordinate system that maps them out) are called geodesics.

Have fun.

Thanks to Louis N. Proyect for asking good questions, and being patient enough to let the explanation unroll.

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Light Cones

Some Thoughts About My Cuba

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Some Thoughts About My Cuba

This is a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of my thoughts and memories and learning of Cuba, without any additional research, or “fact checking,” because I am sure whatever details I may have “wrong” are inconsequential to the truth of my testimony. And besides, I’m in my “don’t give a fuck what you think of me” senior years. Let the picayune, pedantic and nit-pickers do their own fact-checking (it’s easy enough today). But, to those with poetic and musical and socialist souls: welcome!

My family lost everything in the Cuban Revolution (from 1959): family business, property, grandparents’ health (early death); 1961-1967 were hell for us that way. Because of the rabid U.S. assaults on the Cuban Revolution, Fidel followed Raul’s lead and looked to the Communist Party — i.e., Russia — for help (I saw a Russian freighter in Havana harbor in 1960), and in reaction to those assaults, Castro banned rock music and the Beatles (in ~1965-1967; yet Juan Formell, famously, penned the seminal Cuban Rock-and-Roll classic, “Llegué, Llegué / Guararey de Pastorita,” and founded Los Van Van in 1969, https://youtu.be/75VYMyYVPhA).

BUT, my father forever refused to ever play golf (the signal Republican/Conservative/Imperialist/Reactionary/Fascist “sport”; I had offered to buy him golf clubs as a retirement present), and refused to ever visit Miami, where his old Upper West Side NYC buddies from the 1940s-1950s had gone in their senior years, because he did not want to go where “the pain in the neck” Cubans were.

My father had sent money sub-rosa (for bribes) to help his two childhood friends and their families to get out of Cuba in the later 1960s, and he cried when thinking back on it all, saying the U.S. had “destroyed my country.” Che Guevara was executed on my father’s 43rd birthday.

So, I know that Castro made many mistakes, and had dictatorial tendencies, but he was exponentially better for Cuba than the U.S. ever was or ever will be (Cuba si! Yanqui no!, I saw that grafitto painted on Cuban walls in 1959-1960). And the Cuban government always has the U.S. and its embargo and its CIA, as an easy excuse for and distraction from its own mistakes and heavy-handedness in managing Cuba; but there is an abundance of truth in that excuse nevertheless.

Despite its evident poverty, Cuba is what Puerto Rico (I am 50% Puertorriqueño) should be: independent; “the Cubans will never bend the knee,” as the last East German premier has said. Despite killing 2 to 3 million Vietnamese (between 1965 and 1975), and toxifying much of their land with Agent Orange and Cluster Bombs, the U.S. has “forgiven” officially ‘Communist’ Vietnam because it has let itself become a sweatshop for capitalism; Cuba remains unforgiven because it has not. And THAT is a dagger pointed at the heart of American imperialists’ greatest fear.

By the way: rock and roll is, deeply, a Cuban invention. The “French Quarter” of New Orleans is considered by US Americans as the birthplace of rock-and-roll through the African-American roots of Delta Blues, R&B, and Gospel music (rhythmic and charismatic African call-and-response choral music – originally without drums, which were forbidden to American Black slaves).

The French Quarter was actually built by the Spanish governor of New Orleans during the ~25(?) years of Spain’s ownership of that port, by treaty with the French (who had established and owned it previously, and then owned it afterwards – eventually selling it to the Americans in 1803 – all by treaties between France and Spain, because of European wars in the 18th & 19th centuries).

The rhythm-based African music was imported to Cuba with the slave trade (Cuban slaves were allowed the freedom to drum at night, which was forbidden in the U.S. over fear of “signalling” a slave revolt). There was a huge trade from Havana (of Cuban sugar) to New Orleans (and back with furs bound for Europe), and with it rode in Afro-Cuban musicians to New Orleans, who by then had already incorporated colonial Spanish instruments (guitar, flute, violin, brass, piano) into their bands. Those musicians brought in the roots music of what would eventually flower as Blues, Jazz and Rock. Chuck Berry’s “Louis, Louis” is a pure cha-cha-cha.

Today, Cuban popular music incorporates hip-hop (reggeton, via Puerto Rico, and via the many back-channels Cubans have used to gain access to foreign recorded pop music: Cubans are the most talented and accomplished “pop” musicians of the world, and the tap root of it all is Africa). All pop music worldwide is basically African-based, which is why, (pop) musically, Cuba is the “ombligo del mundo” and Africa is its placenta.

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