Whorled View

Today is “Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Day” (not to be confused with the Israeli “Jerusalem Day” held in May) an Iranian-invented occasion to call for the wiping off of Israel from the Middle East map. In celebration of the day Mahmoud Ahbmadinejad, of course, has already spewed his nonsense that Israel’s existence is illegal (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/909545.html). So I think Israel supporters should also have Jerusalem day to show our support for Israel. In particular I think it’s important for all Americans to finally accept why we owe such support to the Jews.

What if you were given irrefutable evidence that top American and British leaders knew that Jews were ignominiously being slaughtered by the millions in 1942, but kept it hush-hush until late 1945, after which time most of the 9 million European Jews were quietly being executed in concentration camps ? The “final solution” didn’t really happen until 1942, so that would cover by far most of the concentration camp deaths. What if those deaths all occurred because most Jews thought they were just being “relocated” so they didn’t put up much of a fight? What if it could have been significantly avoided if of the US and the UK made the most meager efforts to notify the Jewish people (air-dropping leaflets was a daily occurrence), but instead they covered it up?

Well … that’s exactly what happened. Yes, our leaders were quietly complicit in the murder of millions of Jews over the space of a few years. This has been publicly known for over 30 years now, but I never heard about it throughout my public school education. I’m sure it still isn’t taught, although I don’t know why it isn’t. The point is that Roosevelt and his whole cabinet knew it was happening and suppressed the distribution of that information.

You don’t believe me? As I said, it’s thoroughly well documented. Read these excerpts from a speech (http://www.theopavlidis.com/reprints/matsas/part1.htm) given a few years ago to the Jewish Community Center in DC by Dr. Michael Matsas, an expert on the subject (Read his book if you want the documented references):

American diplomats stationed in Istanbul and Cairo sent advice to Washington, as to how the Greek Jews could be saved. The documents with such advice were ignored and were filed in the National Archives, where I was the first one to discover them in 1975. I found over 500 pages of such documents, thanks to the “Freedom of Information Act.” The Allies with their silence helped the Germans in the slaughter of the Jews. The Allies with their silence eliminated even our instinct of survival, which in case of danger, orders you to hide, flee, or fight. They preferred to damage even their own military interests The Germans needed few soldiers to capture Jews who did not offer any resistance.Thanks to the abandonment of the Jews by our British and American allies, thousands of able Jewish men and women were led like lambs to the slaughter houses of the death camps. It is abundantly clear now that the United States knew about the mass killing of the Jews as early as July 1941. In October 1941 the American Military Attache in Berlin reported, “The normal procedure for the Nazis upon taking over a city in the East, was to establish local commandos, to separate the Jews, and to shoot them.” A logical conclusion, writes Richard Breitman, was that the deportees would also be killed if sent to the East.On August 1, 1942, a German businessman transmitted to the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland the information that Hitler had ordered the liquidation of all Jews throughout the territories occupied by Germany. The information was transmitted to England and the United States. John Pehle, the Executive Director of the War Refugee Board, made the following comments in a recent TV documentary: “The State Department was actively suppressing information about the Holocaust, while Undersecretary of State Breckinridge Long tried to cover it up. By suppressing information, the Government becomes an accomplice in what the Germans were doing, by hiding information from the American public. Officials of the Treasury Department who discovered the State Department’s deliberate obstruction of rescue efforts, revealed the “nasty scandal” in a report entitled, “Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews of Europe.”A rabbi from Baltimore, Maryland, in a bitter sermon, suggested that, “If we had any Jewish dignity, we would picket the White House and demand that the President use his influence to stop the killing of the Jews.” Within an hour, the Board of his Congregation fired him, for his disrespect of President Roosevelt, who was beloved by the American Jews and who received 90% of their votes. In November 1942 Rabbi Stephen Wise publicly announced the murder of over two million Jews. In a meeting with the President, Roosevelt declared, “The Government of the United States is very well acquainted with most of the facts that you are now bringing to our attention.” Professor David Wyman said in his book, “The Abandonment of the Jews,” that “anti-Semitism was widespread and the State Department was actively blocking information about the genocide and deliberately obstructed rescue efforts. The press had little to say and this was in the inner pages. The President refused to focus on the issue. The United States and Great Britain were deeply committed to a policy of not rescuing the Jews, while, if the US accepted a policy of rescue, hundreds of thousands would have been saved and in the process it would have rescued the conscience of the nation.” Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau wrote, “We knew in Washington from August 1942 on that the Nazis were planning the extermination of all the Jews of Europe. Yet for nearly 18 months, the State Department did practically nothing. Officials procrastinated or suppressed information about atrocities.” Why did the Government of the United States demonstrate such hostility toward the European Jews? In the TV documentary “America and the Holocaust – Deceit and Indifference,” I believe there is the answer to this question. “Pervasive anti-Semitism dominated the US in 1940. Jews were unacceptable to many employers and they were unwelcome in resorts and country clubs.” Saving the Jews of Europe should have been a moral obligation for the US and not simply a humanitarian act. Five hundred fifty thousand American Jews served with distinction in the Armed Forces of the United States. Eleven thousand were killed, 40,000 were wounded, and almost all of them had relatives in Europe who were abandoned to the hands of the Germans. Those in power in the American government rejected thousands of applications for immigration to this enormous country. Among these applications was that of Anne Frank’s family in Amsterdam. While 6 million Jews were dying in Europe, the United States was becoming a nuclear superpower, thanks to Jewish scientists like Albert Einstein, Oppenheimer, Zillard, Teller, Rabbi, and Admiral Hyman Rickover (inventor of the nuclear submarine), while the relatives of these Jews were left to die in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka. The abandonment of the European Jews by President Franklin D. Roosevelt became obvious when he refused entry to this immense country to the 900 German Jews of the “St. Louis.” Six hundred of them eventually were killed by the Germans. Why is there so much Christian hate toward the Jews? I discussed this subject with a professor of theology at Cornell University who did not know that I am a Jew. He concluded, “Killing the Jews is not enough.” “What can be worse than killing them?” I asked with obvious surprise and shock. “Eternal damnation,” was his reply. I wonder what Jesus would say, if he knew in what kind of degradation fell his noble teachings like “Love your neighbor as you would yourself’ or “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you.” I conclude with a poem by Yitzhak Katznelson, which was written a few days before the Germans killed him, and it seems to be appropriate even today. Sure enough, the nations did not interfere, nor did they protest, Nor shake their heads, nor did they warn the murderers. Never a murmur. It was as if the leaders of the nations Were afraid that the killings might stop.

It stinks when history thumps you on the head. In the defense of those who heard second-hand (like most Church leaders) I’m sure that for most the stories and numbers were just to horrific to be believed as people learned about it through the American rumor mill, but that’s no excuse for the grievous level of apathy - though I think we see the same thing today with regard to the genocide in Darfur, Sierra Leone, and Tibet. Admittedly when this information first came my way my initial gut reaction was that this insidious covertness was never practiced by our leaders, followed by an assumption that there must have been a good reason that they kept quiet, but of course the very idea is ludicrous. Six million European Jews, that’s 2 out of every 3, were murdered and our elected leaders were silent partners for much of the slaughter.

So says Benjamin Netanyahu, former Prime Minister from Israel. This clip is about a week old, but it is incredibly good. It’s one of those little blurbs that gets lost in the shuffle that speaks loads of wisdom that is lost on even the most respected thinkers of our time.



PM Netanyahu makes some extremely good points - the first being the fragility of democracy.Then there’s the insidious attitude of apathy so prevalent among the left side with regard to the danger jihadists like Mahmoud present. They see him as a harmless funny little man, just as Hitler was perceived, and not so long ago. Mahmoud and Hitler share far too much in common. I shudder to consider what liberally bent teachers are telling our kids - that all leaders of all foreign nations are respectable diplomats with sovereign authority which should be appreciated and respected. Not where I come from. Respect is earned, no matter who you are, and Mahmoud is the least deserving of all.

Our nation’s forefathers would never have given a platform of legitimacy to a terrorist bent on world domination the the genocide of any people. The thought is ludicrous. There are public spaces for that, including the internet and news networks like Al Jazeera. A state sponsored university however is a platform of legitimacy - by the mere invitation the University legitimized Ahmadinejad’s genocidal and holocaust denying views. It matters little how degrading was the introduction that the leader of that forum gave to Mr. Mahmoud “I want a jihad”. Would such an audience be given to a known pedophile as if he was a respectable diplomat? There is no doubt that he is developing a nuclear weapons program. Even after it’s built, a nuclear energy plant would cost him far more than Oil-based energy. If he want to save his economy the economical thing to do is build refineries.

But Mahmoud wants fissionable material - easily garnered from nuclear waste. He has also made it clear that the bomb will drop will drop on Israel as soon as it’s developed. What I find amazing is the apathy among the liberal left - almost as if they’re saying “not my problem”, but Netanyahu is probably closer to understanding their apathy as being a lack of understanding or belief.

There’s been so much of this crossing of the protective line of democracy that we’re playing a veritable game of hopscotch with the devil, and it’s only a matter of time until we loose the game.

I’ve heard this batted around before, but when I’ve talked to the industry experts they have always said that the only way solar can be cheaper than coal is after the government provides significant subsidies. In other words: no, not really cheaper …… until now.

Enter Ausra , the Palo Alto solar startup that thinks it can be done - without requiring subsidies to hit the mark. Of course, they will get subsidies that will make it even more attractive for power companies to do it. In fact, such subsidies and rewards are necessary, as the power industry has no incentive to augment their current power production structure.

First of all, for you who are new to solar : solar PV is nowhere near to becoming a solution. Despite all the recent press releases about cheap solar silicon, and even remarkable technologies like ”LETG”, Solar PV will still be completely nonviable for 99% of Americans over the next 20 years. Even with amazing ramp-up schedules there won’t be enough solar silicon produced to appreciably affect the industry in any way. In the next 20 years economical (hence scalable) solar power can only be achieved with solar thermal, where you heat a fluid and then use the resulting expansion and condensation to drive a turbine or a piston.

Solar thermal however is already currently providing electricity in the $0.17/kWh range in the Mojave desert. Some people will say it’s around $0.11/kWh range, but that’s after government subsidies so that doesn’t count. That’s also using old equipment. Those solar fields are 20-30 years old. So it’s reasonable to expect that with the latest advancements solar can become at least as cheap or maybe even cheaper than what coal is producing.

So how? As far as I can tell there are 3 things at work here:

1) Ausra proposes to convert only half of the thermal energy to electricity in real-time, and store the other half into an array of pressurized tanks (http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19440/ ). That means that the heat engine - in this case a turbine - only needs to be half as large as what is currently used. This greatly brings down the cost. It also allows electricity production from the thermal energy in the storage tanks during the night or on cloudy days - something that you can’t do with a windmill or with a solar PV without huge extremely expensive batteries, flywheels, or capacitors.

2) The new process technology is much cheaper. Currently they use salt or oil as the heating fluid, and then pump that fluid through a heat exchanger to create steam to drive the turbine which results in a complex system that loses efficiency in the heat transfer process. The new process uses water directly as the fluid heated up by the sun instead of some intermediary fluid - and create the steam right there in the heating element. This simplifies overall design (although it presents new design challenges), and results in better overall efficiencies.

3) The new equipment is more efficient and robust. As I understand it the most costly consumable in the parabolic trough system is the dewar tubes. A series of these high-tech tubes are connected end to end to make up the pipes that contain the heating fluid (in Ausra’s case this is water). They’re made of stainless steel on the inside and transparent glass on the outside, with a vacuum chamber between the stainless steel and the glass exterior (to reduce heat convection) - similar to how a thermos works. The top side of the glass tube has a mirror to reflect the rays back onto the encased stainless steel tube, which tube is black to maximize heat absorption. As you can imagine the cost of these tubes is outrageous. After 30 years of use however, the cost and their robustness, and efficiency has improved dramatically - which has been one of the primary reasons to cost to run the Mojave facility has come way down in the last 10 years. Other equipment, like the primary parabolic reflectors has come way down too.

They’re still quiet however as to which design they’ll use: the parabolic trough or the huge-amongus heliostat array. My sources indicate the parabolic trough type - and most of the designs for expected solar fields in the next 10 years are of that type. If you ask engineers in the industry what they’d like to do most of them will point to the heliostat. The difference? About a 100,000 degrees.

With a parabolic trough you get a ton of water really hot (300 C). With a heliostat array you can get a little bit of water outrageously hot (theoretically even up into the 6 figures Celsius). They both have the potential of creating tremendous amounts of electricity but employ a very different energy conversion processes. Engineers love the heliostat array just because that’s an unbelievable amount of thermal energy - and really cool stuff happens at those temperatures. For example, get hot enough and the hydrogen disassociates from the oxygen. You can thereby end up generate hydrogen for the hydrogen economy extremely efficiently. However, that isn’t the intended use for the near future.

Anyway … very cool stuff happening here. That’s why FPL (http://biz.yahoo.com/bizj/070927/1526791.html?.v=1 ) has just announced that they’ll be sinking $2.4 billion into solar with austra’s designs, as is PG&E as they double their solar capacity over the next 5 years (http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/070927/aqth135.html?.v=16 ).

I was thinking about thwarting hoaxes this morning. Many of the e-mail virus filtering software claim to also deal with hoaxes, but do they really? I’d like to send a link for hoax-email-filtering to those I know that get sucked into hoaxes most often, but there’s so much email-filtering-software and none of it seems to make very significant claims about it’s ability to filter out hoaxes.

None of these websites allow comments to be attached to the information regarding each hoax. Any site that claims to identify hoaxes should be confident enough to allow public comments to be posted with each hoax indentification.

There are a lot of websites out there who claim to be the authority on identifying popular hoaxes. Snopes.com seems to be the most popular, and they do seem to have a thorough database - largely because they have such a large userbase who notify the webmaster of new hoaxes. I’m not a big fan of snopes though because I’ve historically seen significant bias in their methods (to the extent of improper identification). Furthermore their forums aren’t visitor friendly, creating and overusing their own acronyms and refusing to define them for thier visitors. Here’s some other “hoax” resources: urbanlegends.about.com hoaxbusters.ciac.org www.breakthechain.org www.truthorfiction.com Hoaxbusters.ciac.org and urbanlegends.about.com seem to be the most complete (at least they seemed to easily find very recent hoaxes I was familiar with). None of these websites allow comments to be attached to the information regarding each hoax. Any site that claims to identify hoaxes should be confident enough to allow public comments to be posted with each hoax indentification. Other than hoaxbusters.ciac.org there is little to no qualifying information that gives me any warm fuzzies that the information they’re providing is unbiased, and yet nearly everyone seems to believe in them implicitly. Frankly I find that quite dangerous and misleading. Who made these guys the hoax gestapo, and why should we trust them?

… those who ridicule others for believing in a hoax might be just as rediculous if they implicitly put their faith in a hoax-buster of whom they know nothing about.

In short, it seems the whole internet hoax debunking mechanism is woefully innadequate. There is no policing of the hoax police. It seems anyone with HTML skills can establish themselves as an hoax authority, and those who ridicule others for believing in a hoax might be just as rediculous if they implicitly put their faith in a hoax-buster of whom they know nothing about. I challenge self-procalimed hoax authorities to at least allow some public discussion to be attached to each opinion about a possible hoax. Better yet - make it a poll so the public can read the comments and decide for themselves how hoaxable (yes, I just invented a word) it is. And if there exists a reasonably priced and reliable hoax-filter for email will someone please let the world know about it? Thanks!