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That good old fashioned southern hospitality

I especially appreciated “They bite balls and bums.” By the way, the property is completely empty. Just vegetation.

It’s dead calm at anchor in the Bay of Noumea but two days ago, a south-westerly was blowing hard at the exposed anchorage of Îlot Maître two miles out of Nouméa. Before nightfall, Romain motored in on his steel ketch and tied up to a mooring buoy next to me. In the middle of the night, his mooring line chafed through, the boat broke loose and started drifting towards the reef. All I heard was the sound of the steel hull, scraping against the coral reef. What with the lack of visibility and high waves, there was nothing I could do.

As soon as it got light, I scooted over in my dinghy to eyeball the situation. I asked captain Romain to lower the two uphauls from the two masts. I tied one uphaul to my dinghy, while my neighbor tied the second one to his dinghy. My plan was to pull on the two uphauls laterally to tilt the ketch far enough to dislodge the keel from the reef. Nothing doing. The ketch was made of heavy steel and didn’t budge. Plan B. The tide was coming in, so we tied two mooring lines to the boat’s stern and started pulling the ketch to deeper waters, while Romain put the engine in reverse. Inch by inch the boat was released from the watery embrace and was refloated. Romain dropped anchor and we all went to my boat for a nice beer breakfast.

The solution is twofold. First, runaway materialism and consumerism must be stopped by refocusing our lives on:

• A minimalistic lifestyle
• Self-restraint
• Rejection of materialism and consumerism
• A shift in the value system
• The love of people, not material things.

Second, the use of environmentally harmful means of energy generation, i.e.

• Fossil fuels
• Wind and solar
• Biomass

should be minimized in favor of less harmful generation of energy such as:

• Existing nuclear plants
• Use of uranium and plutonium from nuclear warheads
• Nuclear plants using thorium.

Check out the lyrics of John Lennon’s Imagine and you’ll understand what it’s all about.

Also, watch the documentary The Planet of the Humans on YouTube to get a better understanding of what’s going on. It’s free.

Finally, I’m doing this for my peace of mind. I know nobody’s reading this shit.

So how did we get to this point of no return? In a word: capitalist greed. Corporate capitalist greed that engenders hyper-production to fuel hyper-consumption, driven by mass-media advertising.

And the result is an environmental cluster-fuck of cataclysmic proportion that even Elon Musk can’t put right.

So what’s the solution? Stay tuned. I’ll be back.

Earlier I made a bold statement that there’s no such thing as a sustainable energy source. Lat’s take say solar panels:

• No air pollution
• No carbon footprint
• Minimal maintenance
• Minimal environmental impact

A perfect source of green energy. Well, not quite. Factor in the production of cadmium, gallium, germanium, indium, selenium and tellurium used in the manufacture of solar panels; factor in the labor, energy, transportation and installation costs; factor in the life span, decommissioning, dismantling, disposing and recycling costs and you’ve got yourself one of the dirtiest sources of energy.

(to be continued)

Environmentalism has been hijacked by the capitalist corporate bastards who discovered yet another way of turning a buck. I can just imagine the Koch brothers, Goldman and Sachs and that man of the century and Oscar winner, Al Gore, going into a corporate huddle. Al says:

Listen, you guys. I know these tree huggers at Sierra and Greenpeace. Let’s give’m a bunch of grants to swing public opinion. Then we jump on the bandwagon, build a bunch of biomass plants, solar and wind farms, open rare earth mines and log the shit out of the Amazon rain forest. Also, we start up a couple of green investment funds to finance the whole shabam and we’re laughing all the way to the bank.

And they all have a good belly laugh. (to be continued)

I had a rough night. This environmental thing would not leave me alone. Couldn’t get any shut-eye. This morning I put on my critical thinking cap and googled a little bit deeper to come up with my take on this environmental thing. My mind started buzzing with sexy environmental buzz words:

• Zero carbon emission
• Sustainable energy generation
• Solar panel arrays
• Off-shore wind farms
• Clean energy ethanol

The folks at Sierra and Greenpeace keep using this environmental newspeak, so it’s got to be true, good for the planet, I thought. Fact is, there isn’t a single method of generating energy that’s environmentally sustainable. What happened to environmentalism? What happened to the dogma of green energy? What happened to sustainability?

(to be continued)

I just had my nifty wind generator installed on my boat to be energetically pretty much independent, drastically decreasing my carbon footprint in the process.

Boy did I feel good about it. So smug and self-satisfied that I was finally doing my bit to save the planet.

So there I was, enjoying the sub-sonic whisper of my Ruthland Windcharger 1200 and a coup of Nescafe.

An almost imperceptible, keening thought wriggled its way into the back of my brain and began throbbing with increasing intensity: renewable, Renewable, RENEWABLE! RENEWABLE?

(to be continued)

The livery of Spalax 2 has just been upgraded by an incredibly navy blue set of cushions in the outdoor entertainment area of Spalax 2.

The rule of thumb on a boat is “one hand for the boat and one hand for yourself.” Sounds like good advice but in practice it doesn’t work. More often than not, you have to trim that genoa, adjust that lazy jack, hoist that curtesy flag … with one hand? Forget it.

What you need is a third hand that you don’t have unless you’re Zaphod Beeblebrox. So you grab that sheet with you teeth to keep it from falling in the water or secure the flag hoisting line when attaching the yellow quarantine pennant. Remember, when Caribbean pirates boarded a hapless merchant vessel, they always took their knives between their teeth.

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