OVERVIEW
As feared, 2024 is the second summer of Climate Disaster. Much of North America is facing June heat waves, which will bring 90+ degrees to Maine, for example. The growing heat problem will likely begin to produce body counts this summer. The equatorial regions are already there, but we have not heard about them in North America.
The official media of the American Empire is fixated on Trump. That fixation is not on his degenerating mental condition, which would contradict the idea of him as a legitimate candidate, but on that legitimacy despite his status as a convicted felon. The expected groundwork for Trump to cancel the scheduled debate with Biden is appearing on Murdock media.
Debates do not work with teleprompters, and Trump is now dangerous without a script. No one with any sense is happy with this media tragicomedy of failures, but the planetary community is appalled and frightened. The choice between an ignorant, mentally ill criminal and an aging, functional politician lost in the old world order is a disaster.
Israel continues its genocide in the south while it has already lost the north to Hezbollah. The American media coverage of the first is reduced and nonexistent for the second of those things. We detail below.
Science continues to amaze but it is not enough to make up for the planetary mess that we have made.
MIDDLE EAST WAR -GAZA
Hezbollah's Quarterly Report - Indi.ca
Hezbollah publishes what I call a 'quarterly report'. It's like the jihadi earnings call. The topline numbers (as of June) are that they have conducted 2,125 military operations (total), inflicted 2,000+ casualties on the IOF, and decolonized land 35 km deep into occupied Palestine, unsettling over 230,000 settlers. It's been another bad quarter of genocide from the IOF, and a good quarter of war from the Resistance.
'Israelis' are well aware of this, despite massive wartime censorship. They can see the hills burning themselves, the settlers are deeply unsettled. Yesterday alone, 30 attack drones and 150 rockets targeted 15 military sites in occupied Palestine. Residents of 'New Galilee' have threatened to secede unless the government does something about it. Mainstream ministers like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are calling to attack Lebanon now, to put an end to it, but the generals know better.
CLIMATE DISASTER
Summer 2024 heat wave: These U.S. states will hit dangerous temperatures next week
Experts expect it will be the start of a record-hot season in parts of the country.
Summer is already heating up, and so are concerns about health and safety—especially for more at-risk individuals like elderly or vulnerable populations.
While much of the country is already being blanketed by soaring temperatures, by Sunday the central and eastern U.S. will be coping with crushing heat that could break records and impact millions. The National Weather Service predicts that from Chicago to Boston, as far south as Florida, and across the central states, temperatures will be well into the 90s. The hottest days may fall between June 17 and 20, with overnight lows still in the 70s.
Collapse Is An Outcome, Not A Problem To Be Solved
There is a rule in ecology called the maximum power principle formulated by Lokta in 1925. It can be summarized as follows: “The systems that survive in competition are those that develop more power inflow and use it best to meet the needs of survival.” If one wanted to describe the animating force behind the rise and fall of civilizations, they would be hard pressed to come up with a better one. Complex systems — such as our modern industrial world economy — appear to be ruled by the same ecological principles to which all other complex organisms obey. These rules are so universal, independent from size and scale from microbes to galaxies, that one would do better to call them natural laws. Join me on a wild ride from bacteria to petroleum extraction to see how these rules govern our daily life and how they could eventually lead to the decline of what we call modernity.
SCIENCE-TECHNOLOGY
Making The Jump To Warp Speed Might Actually Be Possible One Day
There have been some awesome inventions in the world of science fiction over the years. Whether it’s the Tardis from “Dr Who” and its miraculous traveling abilities or the teleporting talents of the protagonists in “Jumper,” sci-fi has a knack for dreaming up marvelous modes of transport. Now, however, scientists believe one sci-fi invention could, in fact, become a reality: the warp drive.
Let me start by saying this is all theoretical, and NASA hasn’t yet created a means of hopping between planets with ease, but the tech still sounds awesome. Now that the fun sponging is out the way, let’s talk about this development that’s out to prove that warp drives could one day exist to help us zap around the cosmos with ease.
Scientists from an American university just filed a paper outlining how warp drives could work, according to a report from Space.com. The paper includes talk of complex things like stable matter, shift vectors and something called the Alcubierre metric. In normal speak, this all means that it could be theoretically possible to create an engine that could power us across the cosmos at speeds close to lightspeed.
China has become a scientific superpower [PAYWALL}
In the atrium of a research building at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing is a wall of patents. Around five metres wide and two storeys high, the wall displays 192 certificates, positioned in neat rows and tastefully lit from behind. At ground level, behind a velvet rope, an array of glass jars contain the innovations that the patents protect—seeds.
CAS—the world’s largest research organisation—and institutions around China produce a huge amount of research into the biology of food crops. In the past few years Chinese scientists have discovered a gene that, when removed, boosts the length and weight of wheat grains, another that improves the ability of crops like sorghum and millet to grow in salty soils and one that can increase the yield of maize by around 10%. In autumn last year, farmers in Guizhou completed the second harvest of genetically modified giant rice that was developed by scientists at CAS.
It’s an AI world we are entering — but its also one that may not have the juice to power it.
Take the case of Nvidia’s newest AI chip, an accelerator GPU known as Blackwell, which is a four-inch square assemblage of silicon and wiring etched with 200 billion transistors.
When hooked into an array with thousands of identical processors, it can handle the world’s largest artificial intelligence tasks. Nvidia says Blackwell uses 25 times less power than its predecessors to do the same amount of data processing, making it possible to swiftly and efficiently build new AI uses. But every Blackwell chip also consumes 1,200 watts of electricity. That’s just about enough to power the average U.S. home.
Until next week.