#emmet penney

[grandhotelabyss]

—Emmet Penney, “Why Climate Nihilists Target Beloved Art”

Penney must be reading my mind. He uses art theorist Boris Groys’s gloss on Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square to show how avant-garde utopianism has come to serve corporatist degrowth nihilism, as evidenced by the iconoclasm of deranged youth, who serve as the ignorant foot soldiers of their wealthy, misanthropic elders, the very ones who run our society.

Except that, unlike Penney, I don’t think Malevich’s dream could have gone any other way than toward this revolution-from-above. Trust the tale, not the teller: the tale, in this case, is pure darkness and nothing, but gridded and rationalized—the truth of The Revolution, behind all its mawkish advertising. 

Anyway, Flaubert said that if the powers that be had read Sentimental Education, the Franco-Prussian War might have been avoided. Increasingly, I feel the same about my novel Portraits and Ashes, written in 2013 and published in 2017, with Malevich’s Black Square on the cover, vis-à-vis the catastrophes awaiting us now.

The novel—which has an almost supernal connection to Groys’s thesis on the avant-garde, as I explain in my essay on the theorist’s Total Art of Stalinism—is about the convergence of a nihilistic death-cult, likely state-sponsored, with avant-garde art. Here is an excerpt about the novel’s resident nihilist-iconoclast-artist and his tie to the regnant powers:

Frank Jobe, then all of thirty-one years old, had crossed the planet on his mission to save art by destroying it as such, as an object that could be held as property or viewed from a distance and appreciated as merely beautiful. He wanted to make art instead a tangible force in the lives of those who encountered it. From behind his mirrored shades, his prematurely white hair waving across his tall forehead in the dry winds of the Hindu Kush, he’d told an interviewer, “They say it’s all just signifiers, man, but what’s the signification of this?” Then, infamously, he’d put his cigarette out in the interviewer’s palm. Behind and above them flickered the anamorphic diagonal of holographic fire that Jobe and his team had projected on the steep slope of a mountain on the Afghan border, an opus commissioned by and assembled under the auspices of several non-governmental organizations for the sake of its “searing commentary on the horrors of international conflict.” Jobe would later boast of his piece’s effects. Warlords of various factions, in crossing the mountain pass, rounded with wide and suspicious eyes the illusionist’s slanted flame until they saw the fifty-foot image of a human skull lambent within it; then they crashed their Jeeps or caravans and ordered their men to open fire on the high flame, momentarily suspending their own hostilities. It was this ambitious work of artistic anti-art, entitled The New Ambassador, that brought Jobe his global notoriety. 

His inscrutable intentions helped his cause as well. He was a man of bombastic rhetoric without being very articulate. “Bourgeois art,” he’d said, “is about something, it’s supposed to remind you of something, and you’re supposed to laugh or cry. Which is bullshit, man. I don’t want to remind you of something, I want to be the thing. I want to be the thing you cry when you remember.” 

Was there any moral or political aspect to this or was it a creed of pure sensation? Surely, said Marxist critics, the purpose of protesting “bourgeois art” was to prepare for the utopic and egalitarian relations among a redeemed humanity that would flourish when the reign of the bourgeoisie was brought to an end by the revolution. Failing that, the purpose of his vital and tangible artwork must have been, as another of Jobe’s critics put it, “to recall the subject to the materiality of existence and its attendant ethical responsibilities to the Other.” Jobe wouldn’t say; sometimes he said contradictory or incoherent things, leaving it to the critics and the curators and the professors and the graduate students to decide. 

“What critical and cultural theories inform your praxis?” an interviewer had asked him in Germany during the opening of his piece, The Marriage of Arbor and Rhizome. For this installation he had planted parallel lines of oak trees at regular intervals in square dirt patches on the ground floor of a gleaming new white and glass gallery in Berlin. In fifty years, the oaks in stately colonnade would overtake the gallery. The branches’ gentle force would lift and prise loose the glass roof until it would fall in a sparkling explosion among the acorns. The roots would ever so slowly swell under the white walls hung with their blank Suprematist canvases until they listed and fell in their turn. Eventually, no one would ever be able to tell that a gallery had been there at all. 

“There are no theories,” Jobe said. “Just praxis. People who write theory are undertaking the praxis of jacking off, which is cool if that’s what you’re into, but I’m into the real thing.”

#emmet penney #art #aesthetics #art theory #boris groys #fiction #creative writing #kazmir malevich #avant-garde

[postgender2111]

Rolling blackouts likely if we embrace wind/solar

The UK's Prophetic Power Shut Off

[From Emmet Penney, who offers a plethora of information on his podcast - Nuclear Barbarian, & [email protected], a free e-newsletter.]

The United Kingdom is asking households to cut their electricity consumption during peak hours to spare the grid.

"Hundreds of thousands of households took part in the effort to reduce electricity demand during a couple of hours when energy supplies were forecast to be particularly tight," reports Bloomberg.

"There was a financial incentive offered, but there’s more to the emergency measures. They’re a preview of the choices and behaviour that will have to become commonplace as the world transitions its energy supply to depend overwhelmingly on intermittent renewable sources."

Octopus Energy reported that 400k customers took part. Last Monday, households cut usage by 200 MWh--that's equal to Bristol, one of the ten largest cities in the UK, blacking out. 

It appears many believe that encouraging consumers to slash energy use will simply become routine as the transition to renewables continues. 

“Demand-side response needs to become part of the everyday, part of business as usual,” Sarah Honan, flexibility policy manager at the Association for Decentralised Energy, told a committee in the UK Parliament last week.

Emmet Penney, the Nuclear Barbarian and excellent nuclear educator. TY Emmet for sharing information so generously.

#U.K. #London #Grid #Wind #Solar #energy transition #nuclear barbarian #emmet penney #intermittent #weather dependent #nuclear power

[tonkihollywood]

Breaktime warrensburg mo

#BREAKTIME WARRENSBURG MO FULL#

The subject asked voluntarily to be taken to the Bothwell Regional Health Center for treatment. The subject admitted that they wished to harm themselves. Upon arrival, contact was made with the suicidal subject. Thursday afternoon, Officers were dispatched to the 1600 block of South Engineer Avenue to investigate a reported suicidal subject. Officers spoke with the victim, and a report was completed.

#BREAKTIME WARRENSBURG MO FULL#

A violation of a full order of protection was committed in the 1300 block of South Grand Avenue. On the evening of August 13th, Officers responded to the lobby of the Police Department in reference to a violation of a court order. Three hours later, the juvenile returned home and was taken off the missing person list. The juvenile was entered as a runaway and a referral will be completed. The juvenile left the scene on foot before Officers arrived. He also stated the juvenile had damaged some of his property. Officers made contact with an adult male who stated his juvenile son assaulted him in the parking lot. Officers responded to a domestic disturbance at the JC Penney store, 3159 West Broadway Boulevard Thursday evening. Waters was taken to the Sedalia Police Department, where he was fingerprinted and given a citation with a court date. Waters, 61, of Sedalia, was arrested for Driving While Suspended. It was discovered the driver's Missouri license was suspended. Officers made contact with the driver, and ran his information though Dispatch. Sedalia Police conducted a vehicle stop in the area of South Emmet Avenue and East 7th Street Thursday night. The suspect has not been identified at this time. Lowe reported a property damage incident. On the night of August 14th, Officers were dispatched to the Broadway Car Wash, 2618 East Broadway Boulevard. The driver, who was not named in the report, was released with a warning. Contraband was located in the vehicle and seized for destruction. Friday morning, Officers conducted a traffic stop near the intersection of East 6th Street and South Massachusetts Avenue.

#Breaktime warrensburg mo

[the-funtime-autocrat]

In order for this to work in the United States, the federal government could consolidate the nuclear arms of General Atomics, General Electric, Westinghouse, and others into a single public corporation. This federal entity would be mandated to decarbonize the American electricity grid. First, the US will need to commit to an industrial policy like those of France and South Korea, which allowed them to create their own nuclear programs to manufacture the necessary reactors. These reactors (and their plants) will need to be standardized if they’re going to recoup the aforementioned benefits of repetitive construction. A substantial number of new reactors will need to be built per year, so American industry would have to increase its construction capacity, especially to provide the necessary heavy forging. Reactors already in service should undergo safety reviews that extend their licensing. They should also undergo refurbishment and retrofitting with technical upgrades to increase efficiency and safety. Alongside the reactor buildout, a strong domestic fuel cycle industry to provide the uranium would need to be developed. Second, the US will have to train a workforce. Staffing these new plants would strain the capacity of the currently existing nuclear engineering programs in both academia and industry, which need to pass along decades of expertise to a new generation of nuclear workers. In the original spirit of the National Defense Education Act of 1958, the federal government should forgo market incentives and directly award government grants to higher education institutions, vocational schools, and students in nuclear energy and related fields to scale up along with the growing industry as quickly as possible. Not counting construction, and taking the Diablo Canyon plant as a model, an estimated 250,000 workers will be needed to operate some 230 of these plants in perpetuity.

Emmet Penney and Adrian Calderon, “We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal” (September 25th 2020).

#Nuclear Power #Technological Progress #nuclear reactor #nuclear power plant #American System of Economics #Economic Nationalism #State Corporation #State Capitalism #Corporatism

[postgender2111]

Make this Lego 3,000 piece design of a nuclear power plant a reality by voting for the set via the LEGO Ideas website. So far, 2,800 supporters have logged into the LEGO site to cast their voice toward the 10,000 votes needed to manufacture it.

I'll do just about anything to keep kids away from screens while promoting a reliable, affordable and clean [YES CLEAN!] energy source that captures all of its by-products. New nuclear facilities re-use spent fuel. We have the technology. Now we need the political will to reduce carbon as we transition away from fossil fuels. Wind-solar and batteries do not have the oomph and are not scalable.

See more at www.eco-nuclearsolutions.org. There are some really interesting podcasts and books on it if you want to learn more. These guys and their guests have taught me so much.

1. Decouple Hosted by Chris Keefer, MD, a Canadian advocate for nuclear power.   https://www.decouplemedia.org/podcast   

2. Nuclear Barbarian, hosted by Emmet Penney, a young nuclear advocate.

3. Power Hungry Podcast hosted by Robert Bryce, a journalist, author and movie producer of JUICE the story of electricity available free on YouTube.  https://robertbryce.com/power-hungry-podcast/

4. Titans of Nuclear, hosted by Bret Kugelmass, a mechanical engineer and entrepreneur. https://www.titansofnuclear.com/

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Take California as an example. Since 2001, the state has sought to replace its fossil fuel energy with renewables. The subsequent instability of their electrical grid caused blackouts during a heatwave this August; when wildfires broke out the following month, a blanket of ash blotted out the sun in some places, cutting the state’s solar energy output by one-third. But the grid’s efficacy is only part of the problem. Energy in California is incredibly expensive for ratepayers, despite the declining cost of wind and solar installations. Since the state further expanded its variable renewables portfolio between 2011 and 2019, consumer electricity prices have leapt 30%. California could be a preview of what American life will look like if Biden’s plan or the Green New Deal succeeds, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Had California spent its money on nuclear energy instead of renewables, it could have decarbonized by now. That is why any climate plan that doesn’t prioritize nuclear above all other energy sources is destined to exacerbate climate problems rather than solve them.

Emmet Penney and Adrian Calderon, “We Need a Nuclear New Deal, Not a Green New Deal” (September 25th 2020).

#Nuclear Power #nuclear power plant #Nuclear Reactors #Technical Progress