Germany's Freefall

Burning (Plastic) Materials

Burning plastic is like a red flag to environmentalists, something like blasphemy. Hence, everything has to be recycled – an energy-intensive process because you have to invest energy in order to recycle plastic. When it comes to expensive carbon-reinforced plastics, however, it may make sense to reuse these kinds of fibers. Otherwise, plastic is itself energy because it’s solely made up of hydrocarbons and, hence, solely of petroleum.

Combustion is an issue that we will examine later in terms of “energy” and the “energy supply”. When being “burned”, as we call it in colloquial German, plastics produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O) and burn atmospheric oxygen. By-products, such as hydrochloric acid, or other products, such as nitrogen oxides, can be created. Hydrochloric acid can only be created when the plastic contains chlorine, for example in the case of PVC or polyvinyl chloride. Nowadays, a whole host of waste gas filters is placed on top of each chimney of the waste incineration plant. This has been the case for the past thirty years. Of course, pollutants can be detected in exhaust gases. No argument there. Everything can be detected with today’s measuring methods. If you were to examine the exhaust gases that any normal person exhales, you would probably have to shut these all down. It’s harmful to the environment, which is a real problem in cemeteries because corpses are hazardous waste, especially after a cancer therapy or with amalgam fillings.

Plastic has about half the calorific value of coal and petroleum per kilogram weight. About half of the energy can be produced during combustion. The carbon dioxide it emits is probably better since plastic has a higher proportion of hydrogen and thus not produce that much carbon dioxide during combustion. Instead, more water is released per energy produced. In chemistry lessons, the keyword here is the “stoichiometric ratio”. By the way, water vapor is a greenhouse gas as well. This is often glossed over because it doesn’t fit neatly into any pro-green argument.

Naturally, waste incineration plants emit pollutants. Naturally, not everything has to be burned. But recycling everything and shipping it abroad doesn’t seem to make much sense either.

Everything overdone is no good.

Consequences

Waste that can’t be recycled is transported abroad using a lot of energy to be recycled there. That’s how people in Germany live according to the principle: “O Holy St. Florian, please spare my house, set fire to another one.” What’s so abstruse about the entire situation is that Germany has almost perfect control over its waste separation: Used paper and plastic packaging are sorted. Residual waste, such as kitchen waste, vacuum cleaner contents and similar waste combusts poorly. As a result, the last plastic waste is shipped to third world countries in order to be sorted there. Petroleum or other substances must be used in German waste incineration plants to increase waste combustibility. Single-variety plastics not used for packaging, such as old plastic buckets, end up as residual waste.

“Side Effects”

I once witnessed where I used to live how five containers of plastic waste were transported by truck to the Czech Republic. Why was this done?

Plastic packaging material is a relatively good fuel. Yet burning these is prohibited. The enterprising politician gets paid to dispose of the plastic by driving it to the Czech Republic using diesel fuel, thus increasing overall traffic congestion, and then burning it there in order to produce energy. Yet the politician in the Czech Republic gets to enjoy another salary.

Something like this is still relatively simple, contributing at least to a three-digit million Euro deficit for Germany every year, all the while making Germany look ridiculous to its neighbors, who aren’t that stupid either. Yet Germans are convinced that only they know the golden path. Now to something more complex.

Our Luxury Problem: Food and Toxin

Nothing can illustrate the tendency towards “self-optimization” better than the perennial subject of nutrition and toxins. This gets really complex now since both are closely intertwined.

The philosopher, physician and theologian Manfred Lütz points out in the introduction of his book “Lebenslust” (Lust for Life) that this is both a religious and a political topic, and satirical reality as well.

How susceptible nutrition is to Voodoo reporting can be demonstrated with the subject “margarine”. A study was published over fifty years ago that warned of the dangers of cholesterol. The company Procter&Gamble, was advertising margarine since butter and the cholesterol contained therein were regarded as bad for the heart. This “insight” was based on a single study. This resulted in “mountains of butter” in Germany, which had preoccupied the media for months on end. So much butter was not eaten that it was given away to East Germany. East Germany then sold it back to West Germany to obtain foreign currency.

The problem was that the study had been rigged: Twenty-two countries were examined, but the results from only seven countries, which produced “correct” results, were published (it was even called “The Seven Countries Study”). The author, Ancel Keys, had admitted in a 1997 interview that there had never been a connection between dietary cholesterol and cholesterol associated with heart disease.

One single fake study had caused billions of Deutschmarks in damage and only because people wanted to “believe” things and cared about their health. Strangely enough, no one has come up with the idea that the situation could be the same today, just concerning other matters. This behavior can, I think, be called “naive”.

Coincidentally, forty years ago I had personally attended a lecture by a nutritionist who was already complaining about the margarine hype and who preferred butter. He demonstrated how unnatural the production process of margarine can be. It was thus known. Facts were already being ignored back on those days. Furthermore, the expert warned against the traces of catalysts present as heavy metals in cheap margarine as a residue from the manufacturing process.

But “health pills” or pills that make you feel better have always existed, even 200 years ago. These couldn’t have been vitamin pills because vitamins weren’t known yet, but were heavy metals. Yes, in low doses, but heavy metals nevertheless. These are toxic.

Why were these pills sold as “health pills”? People at the time had suffered from “uninvited guests” like tapeworms, and they didn’t like heavy metals. The parasites departed. Humans can partially excrete heavy metals through their sweat. What’s more, they have an antibiotic effect, but are toxic at too high a dosage. Two-hundred years ago, many great minds like Beethoven died from heavy metal poisoning: Wine was sweetened with lead sugar, and arsenic sulphur was used.

Understanding the above logic with the “health pills”, which is incomprehensible from today’s point of view, is necessary in order to understand the relativity of “a healthy diet”, which therefore doesn’t exist.

Rice Wafers

In 2015, rice wafers came under fire as they were shown to contain arsenic. Apparently, the process of expanding the rice makes the heavy metal bioavailable. The rice came from China. Rice wafers: Those are those round things that come in a stack of about fifteen pieces with a diameter of about 10 centimeters (4 inches). It’s a popular food for babies or toddlers. By the way, they taste just how I imagine cardboard tastes.

Even venereal diseases used to be combated with drugs containing heavy metals. Their antibiotic effect was used for this purpose. The drug was called “Salvarsan”. That was less than 100 years ago. Of course, people died during this therapy; many thousands more than what we would call a “side effect” today. Penicillin is used these days. Penicillin is, by the way, a mycotoxin or mold-poison.

Whether heavy metal usage is still commonplace in China or whether the metal in rice wafers occurs naturally is something I can’t judge. However, this is of no importance.

Conversely, when we examine the nematodes in fish it’s exciting to see how people can mutate into “thrill seekers”. You eat raw fish (Sushi) and then complain about fish tapeworms. Since you want to be hip, you are willing to take that risk. Normal people cook meals. This shows that today’s diet has nothing to do with “common sense”.

The highlight are “black smoothies”, which contains finely dispersed activated carbon. The inherent “logic” is obviously (?) derived from activated charcoal tablets, which bind toxins in acute cases of poisoning. How these activated carbons want to “know” which substances are toxins and which are nutrients is a mystery. Apparently, drinkers of this kind of smoothie apparently attribute more intelligence to them than to themselves.

Smoothies are a “modern” food. Bacteria live on every plant and on

every fruit. This isn’t bad because they protect themselves with their cell walls. Leaves often have a layer of wax, making it very hard for bacteria to penetrate. When you put everything into a mixer, the cell walls will break up allowing the bacteria to multiply quickly because the surface that these bacteria can attack has increased one thousandfold (again, the area rule applies here; math is the same everywhere). To keep the temperature low, you add ice because 10° Celsius (50° F) more will double their growth rate. In the middle of summer, a smoothie is thus a proven way to get food poisoning if you let it sit for a longer period.

Toxins in Food

Somehow, toxins are being continuously detected in food these days. Surely we can do without them, can’t we?

One thing is clear: Pests and fungi propagate better in monocultures than in the wild. That’s statistics – the distance to the next identical plant is shorter. What’s more, they have to reproduce in a reliable way. To do this, they have to make sure that their seeds ripen. Conversely, if they do not have this mechanism, these plants wouldn’t exist. The astronomer Harald Lesch says: “One shouldn’t be surprised that cat fur has holes where the eyes are”.

Plants have “built-in” mechanisms that prevent animals from eating their fruit prematurely. Some fruits have hard peels. Apples have a peel with a wax layer.¹¹ Most, however, contain toxins, so-called “stomach poisons”.

Humans invented several methods to render these poisons harmless: e.g. when making sourdough, poisons are rendered harmless by bacteria. But the most important thing is: to cook them!¹² Humans are clever, too: When cooking beans, the housewife pours away the soaking water. This gets rid of some of the poisons. She knows that beans are quite toxic.

Another part of these poisons is rendered harmless by cooking them. In the course of evolution, humans have accustomed themselves to the remaining poisons.

Of course, different peoples tolerate different amounts of poison. Some people aren’t poisoned by raw beans. They need to have a genetic defect to do this, and they eat this type of bean to prevent tropical diseases. There are people who die from these beans as well. Perhaps they would have died much earlier from the tropical disease. This is a pure optimization process that selects the least evil.

Then humans began to cultivate plants. They did this to increase the yield, but also to reduce the poisons inherent in the plants that prevent them from being eaten. This protection was then acquired by humans. People know that the bitter tips of cucumbers should be cut off. The same is true for zucchini. Bitter areas show that they’re toxic: A German amateur gardener accidentally killed himself a few years ago on his own home-grown zucchini: His wife had refused to eat the bitter soup and survived. That’s why regulations exist for the seeds. If toxic varieties are created, things can end up badly, as the amateur gardener demonstrated in his self-experiment. The case was reported by the press. Unfortunately, not on what something like this implies and what it means to our modern system.

Humans perceive the taste as “bitter” or unpleasant precisely because evolution has arranged things in such a way that humans can survive life’s struggle against poisons. If humans were to perceive poisons as sweet, then they would’ve died out long ago. Basically, no animal would ever think to say: “I'm going to eat this now because it tastes particularly nasty so I can get healthy.” Animals are smarter than humans.

Which isn’t to say that the system can overregulate itself sometimes. Experts and the people who write the rules also pretend to be on the safe side because they know what happens when you don’t write the provisiions correctly. I refer to the poisonous zucchini.

Now there is a perception that poisons, like the ones used by farmers, are bad and you have to do away with them entirely. How are plants supposed to “defend” themselves against predators? This is especially impossible because the stomach poisons have been bred out of them. Seen this way, insecticides and pesticides are necessary. By using modern technology, i.e. weather forecasting or other methods, it’s possible to minimize the use of poisons. Plants don’t have this option; they have to carry the poisons permanently with them because they don’t have a built-in weather forecasting computer.

It takes on religious traits when people want to use “natural poisons only”. They think that “naturally” extracted poisons are more harmless than the same poisons made from petroleum.

This is when you notice that the line of causality has been abandoned and that demons and gods have found their way back into modernity – post factually. Giordano Bruno probably would’ve never imagined, 420 years after being burned at the stake, that he would’ve been burned the same way by some people in order for them to practice their religion.

This nonsense becomes damaging to society when these same people get at each other’s throats: Normal people argue based on the current state of science and technology (which can change, too, but only within the valid laws of nature). Others do so according to the state of their religious convictions. Each only wants to discredit the other. Both sides nearly act the same.

During the Crusades, people were burned, murdered and raped in the name of Christianity. This doesn’t mean that the other religions are any better; just as all religions will at some time or another have to come to an end. But, no – with ours, the one we’ve got now, something like this doesn’t happen of course.

Meaning and Abuse of Religious Views

Religions provide valuable information on how the coexistence of people in the respective culture can proceed without conflict, as is the case with the 10 Commandments, for example. Furthermore, they serve to ensure the survival of the religious group. However, they’re also subject to a certain evolution. Might makes right here, too.

When it comes to the abuse of religious views, the arrogance of people who believe in God over non-believers or people of other faiths is currently in the spotlight. This attitude is pronounced among fanatical believers. This leads to their alleged right to subjugate and physically destroy unbelievers and people of other faiths. All you need to do is recall the persecution of Christians in Africa by Muslim extremist groups, the expulsion of Muslim minorities by the Buddhist Burmese, the constant clashes between Buddhists, Hindus in India, and Islamists and Hindus in Pakistan. Last but not least, there’s the perpetual conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, which always claims a large number of lives – all in the name of Allah.

Individual groups of non-believers (atheists) are not sparing in their arrogant remarks about believers who don’t regard the life of man as limited to any earthly existence. Atheist-oriented leaders have proven to be hostile to religion. For example, Stalin persecuted Christians, and Christians had to endure substantial disadvantages in East Germany.

However, it’s particularly reprehensible to persuade people with promises of paradise to drag other people to their deaths as living weapons for the sake of faith.

Armed conflicts between the different Christian communities and the crusades against Islam in ancient Palestine are a thing of the past. Yet they’re threatening to erupt again in the Irish conflict in the course of the Brexit.

But the focus should be on the discussions between the spiritual leaders of the various religious communities and atheist groups in order to counteract the abuse of religious views and to promote interpersonal tolerance.

Organic – What’s That?

Organic – is in most cases nothing logical: First of all, you have to know that toxicity thresholds are in reality often set in a quasi arbitrary (!) manner. Sweden has high dioxin thresholds for Baltic fish. The dioxin content in the Baltic Sea is high. Organic chickens are contaminated more with dioxin than battery-caged chickens. But even this dosage can be completely neglected because nowadays everything can measured, even micro traces. These can always be found if you look hard enough.

Conversely, some people think that even the smallest amount of poison is harmful. A 2017 special issue of the German issue of “Spectrum of Science”, entitled “The Mysterious World of Poisons”, had questioned this: According to the current state of science, minimal amounts of poison have a positive effect. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that children who grow up with cats, dogs and horses have fewer allergies. Hydrogen sulfide has a healing effect. If you consume too much, it’ll be poisonous. So it’s not as simple as it seems. People have learned to live with poisons. Caffeine is the stomach poison of the coffee plant. It protects against intestinal cancer and has a mood-lifting effect.

It’s unscientific to claim the existence of “natural” and “unnatural” poisons: When the chemical formula is identical, the substance is too: The origin is irrelevant. The cultivated plants have to be sprayed with some kind of poison because the poisons that originally protected the plants against insects and fungi were “bred out” of them. So, they have to be applied externally (see also chapter “Grain, Corn and Organic Potatoes”).

That’s why prehistoric people ate much more meat because it doesn’t require stomach poisons. Most animals have other mechanisms to protect themselves from being eaten.

The advantage of organic products may be that poisons aren’t used as carelessly as in conventional cultivation. However, the disadvantage is that instead of spraying “artificial poisons”, things like copper are sprayed instead. This sounds more “natural” than “wicked chemistry”. In the long run, however, the soils will become enriched with the heavy metal copper. Metals are elements that, unlike hydrocarbons, i.e. modern poisons, can’t be broken down at all. Is this “idea” really that good?

A gastric and intestinal therapeutic agent is currently under attack. It contains celandine as its active ingredient. It’s a “natural” substance, but may, in some cases, lead to liver failure. This was known, but not mentioned on the package insert [43]. The Bayer company (producer of Roundup) probably wanted to sell it as a “natural medicine”.

You should beware of foods like stevia, soy or goji berry the next time you visit your local health food store. Their effects aren’t conclusive and humans have not had time to adapt to these substances during their evolution.

By the way, “Kamut”, a cereal that you can buy in any health food store, is a patented wheat. There’s nothing “primordial” about it because if grain were primordial it couldn’t be grown at all, as the yield would be so miserable that every organic farmer would be forced to file for bankruptcy. Organic knows marketing, too. But this does not mean that this grain is somehow “bad”.