Latest news with #GreatBlackout
Epoch Times
18-05-2025
- Epoch Times
Power Outage, Inner Power
Commentary April 28th will be remembered as the largest blackout (so far) in European history. Power went down in the whole of continental Spain and Portugal, taking more than 20 hours to come back in some areas. It has been blamed on technical causes, although the Audiencia Nacional (National High Court) has opened an When I was growing up, at the end of Franco's dictatorship, small blackouts were frequent. The only outcome used to be that you were left without TV (black and white) or that, at nightfall, you had to light candles (some were ready). Landlines kept working. We relied much less on electricity. The internet didn't even exist (except as a military project) and it would be decades before the word 'cyberattack' was coined. More than half a century later, blackouts are unusual. But when they happen, as with this 'Great Blackout,' they create a helplessness that was previously unheard of. One would have imagined that this was not the road to progress. The more sophisticated a technology, the more fragile it tends to be. My grandfather drove a truck and knew how to repair most breakdowns. When our tools were simple, you knew how to mend them yourself. Today, tools are amazing, but only specialists know how to fix them. Technological progress makes life easier, but it also makes us more vulnerable. Today we have more information and more power than ever before, but we seem to be more lost. Everything points to a technological progress that is more and more incredible, in the strict sense that it is becoming less and less credible. Related Stories 5/11/2025 5/3/2025 The philosophers that have pondered about technology conclude that it is not a simple tool that we use. There comes a moment when technology escapes our control and takes hold of the wheel. From then on, alas, we are the ones being used by technology. Jacques Ellul wrote in ' 'Everything happens as if the technical system grew by an internal, intrinsic force, and without any decisive human intervention.' Reflecting on the growing imposition of mechanistic and dehumanizing visions, psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist writes in ' '[W]e are in the grip of something bigger than us that tells us that it has our interests at heart in order to better control us.' On the afternoon of the day after, April 29th, El País (the Spanish equivalent of the New York Times ) ran an article with the title ' I have read widely in history, but I had never heard of an 'Analog Age.' Dictionaries define analog as a way of conveying information ('analog thermometer' and 'analog television' are two examples I found). However, is conveying information all that matters in life? Anyone with a soul knows that human life and history cannot be reduced to the transmission of information. If this piece you are reading is any good, it will be because it does much more than convey information. Jaron Lanier calls I type 'Analog Age' in Google and I get this: 'The 'Analog Age' refers to a period characterized by physical representations of information and mechanical processes, contrasting with the digital age which uses electronic data and computers. This era was defined by technologies like vinyl records, printed books ...' According to the prevailing technolatry, vinyl records and printed books belong to the past (note the past tense: 'was defined…'). Today, anyway, the vast majority of book readers prefer to read on paper (a few decades ago, it was vainly proclaimed that books were doomed). As for vinyl records, they are making a comeback (in the US their sales are growing more rapidly than those of other music formats) because The talk about the 'Analog Age' can only be done from an irrational faith in the total and lasting triumph of the 'Digital Age.' From the belief that everything—including currencies, IDs, therapies—must be digitized. But during the Great Blackout, in most cases you couldn't do your shopping or get a taxi ride if you didn't pay in cash. The so-called 'digital transformation' entails an erosion of what have been the rules of the game of human existence since the beginning of time: it displaces the properly human ways of acting and being in the world, and replaces them with their robotic or technocratic counterparts. It covertly imposes a technocratic totalitarianism in which people are more controllable, more manipulable, more vulnerable, and less autonomous. How come we are being forced to digitize everything, when blackouts cannot be ruled out? In a recent article in 'Despite today's high standards of reliability, low-probability but high-impact blackout events can still happen. These networks are not designed to be completely blackout-free because achieving such a level of reliability would require investment far beyond what is economically feasible.' Isn't there something quite peculiar about a world that relies more and more on electricity and yet cannot guarantee its supply? This does not look like a road to progress. Incidentally, it is not impossible for human life to flourish without electricity. Plato and Aristotle, Bach and Mozart, Leonardo and Goethe, never in their lives saw a phone, a screen or a socket. Nowadays, though, every new technology is uncritically embraced simply because it's new. And if it has adverse effects, we dogmatically believe that they will be solved by technological progress itself. Back in 1950, philosopher and theologian Romano Guardini wrote in ' Das Ende der Neuzeit ): 'Modern man believes that every increase in power is simply 'Progress,' advance in security, usefulness, welfare, life force […].' And concluded that 'The bourgeois superstition of believing in the intrinsic reliability of Progress has been shattered.' By 1950, after the Second World War, when it became clear that technology could empower in humanity, the idea of history as an irreversible path of progress had begun to shatter. Indeed, the idea of linear progress would have been incomprehensible to most human civilizations, including Ancient Greece and the Renaissance, which sought to return to the models of classical culture. After the mid-twentieth century, thinkers such as Arendt, Jaspers, Tolkien, Huxley, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, Guardini, Mumford, Schumacher, Ellul, and Illich, much as they disagreed on other issues, were all deeply concerned about the path the world was taking. The modern world dreamed that it was sailing on the ocean of History, aboard the ship Progress, toward a shore of Prosperity and Liberty. There were storms, we lost our way, but in the long run, Progress would deliver. Now we are not so sure. We find ourselves in turbulent waters, as if we were in rapids. The dream seems to be turning into a nightmare. We are left with one main option: to wake up into a wider consciousness, to come to our senses, to rediscover the here and now, and to realize that the ocean, ship, and shore are such stuff as dreams are made on. From the Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
New York Times
03-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
In the Dark, We Found Joy
We took out a candle, lit it and finished our dinner. In darkness. In complete silence. On April 28, the so-called Great Blackout, one of the strangest days of our lives, left all of the Iberian Peninsula in the dark. For over 10 hours we were completely cut off, unable to make phone calls or connect to the internet. Later I learned the luckiest among us had found an old transistor radio with batteries to hear the news. The three of us — my partner, my 6-month-old daughter and me — had no such luck. Now it was nighttime. Fear and all its ghosts might have lurked. Occasionally, a random car or a few pedestrians with flashlights passed by our window. One might imagine the other things that were quiet. How the burglar alarms — the big business of keeping fear at bay — were not working. How the security cameras had gone blind. That no one was able to call the police. This, then, might have been a night dreamed of by thieves. A night when the evil-minded would seize the cover of darkness and all that silence to break into factories, businesses, shops, isolated villages, country houses or urban dwellings. But they did not. This was no nightmare. Indeed, the Great Blackout was the opposite. It was like a dream — a world populated only by the kindest among us, evil intentions quashed. Average citizens directed traffic at intersections without working lights. Others brought water and food to passengers stranded on trains that had stopped in the middle of nowhere. Taxi drivers, unable to process credit cards, gave out their cellphone numbers so customers could pay their fares when the electricity returned. In the transportation chaos — the trains that stalled, the buses that didn't come, the subways idled — some schools stayed open late that afternoon so no children would be left alone waiting for someone to pick them up. Hospitals, always free in Spain, operated with generators and continued to care for the ill. Without working cellphones, children and teens gathered in ways more typical of decades past than of today. Strangers came together in the streets to talk or drink beer. Improvised signs advised everyone to 'chug it before it gets warm.' All around, everything I saw underscored how the world carried on peacefully. It seemed everyone embraced the day with a good dose of humor and — dare I say? — even joy. Somehow we knew that everything would be fine. That there would be no muggings, no threatening disorder. Somehow we knew that no one would pull out a gun. This was not one of Hollywood's apocalyptic films. Quite to the contrary: Calm, generosity and dedication among public servants and workers prevailed. Perhaps that is the great difference between the forces of the far right — in America, in parts of Europe, now insisting the only true path is one of individualism, each man for himself — and the trust that the European welfare state that I was raised with builds in the minds of a community. Here we found we had trust in others and in our country, in the sense of community. Is there a more powerful weapon than that? Is there a greater shield than that? Knowing that others are there to help you, not to harm you, that we each need one another. That is the key. That is not to say we are invincible. We in Spain have lived again and again through moments that show us our very vulnerability. During the floods that washed out Valencia last autumn, during the Covid pandemic five years ago. This week it was the blackout of Spain and Portugal and even, briefly, Andorra and parts of France, hours in which nothing moved forward. But accepting we are vulnerable, each of us, should mean we rely on one another more, not less, that individualism and isolationism are not the path forward. In fact, what I saw this week is how much we are strengthened as a society and as individuals when we choose joy and mutual support rather than fear in the face of adversity. That choice allows us the privilege of feeling safe at home and in the streets. It was not until the wee hours that night, after the day of darkness, long after the three of us had tucked ourselves into bed, that we noticed a few house lights flickering back on. My partner and I smiled. What a relief. Everything was fine. Our baby girl was sleeping blissfully. We plugged in our phones and our computers. And we went back to sleep.
France 24
01-05-2025
- Health
- France 24
RFK Jr alarms medical experts with vaccine 'placebo testing' plans
There is lots of scrutiny around renewable energies after the shock nationwide power outage that hit Spain and Portugal earlier this week. Spanish daily La Vanguardia asks that very question on the front page of its website: Who is to Blame for the Great Blackout? Was it a photovoltaic plant that shut down, a French disconnection, a poorly designed IT system or overconfidence in the system's infallibility? We still don't know what caused the blackout, but many have been quick to blame renewable energy for the system's failure. But in the same edition, La Vanguardia interviews the head of an energy research group, Jose Luis Dominguez, who says that Spain needs to continue investing in renewable energy. He concedes, though, that the blackout highlights the need for adjustments in regulation and oversight of companies. And that the low inertia of solar and wind energy requires more investment and innovation in reacting to unforeseen circumstances. That's the message echoed in an article from Reuters entitled "Don't blame renewables for Spain's power outage". Instead, the news agency says, Monday's blackout should be a warning to governments that investment in power storage and grid upgrades are just as important as expanding renewable energy projects. The US department of health is planning to change the way vaccines are tested and critics say the move could undermine public trust in immunisation. The Washington Post reports that Robert F. Kennedy Jnr wants to impose placebo testing in all new vaccines, in which people receive either the vaccine or an inert substance like a saline shot. Placebo testing is commonplace for new pathogens but not for well-researched diseases like measles and polio. Medical experts say this could be unethical because the placebo group would not receive a known effective intervention to a potentially deadly disease. The Post says the health department wants to increase transparency. Since Kennedy Jnr's appointment as head of health, the US top vaccine regulator Peter Marks has resigned under pressure, while Kennedy Jnr has continued to express his scepticism around vaccines amid an ongoing deadly measles outbreak in the US. The investigative journalism nonprofit collective Forbidden Stories has released a new report detailing the shocking treatment of Ukrainians in a Russian prison. Forbidden Stories is a collective which aims to continue the investigative reporting of journalists who have been silenced. Their Victoriia Project is named for Ukrainian journalist Victoriia Roshchyna's efforts to document the war in Ukraine. On her fourth trip in 2023, however, she never came back. Earlier this year, what has been identified as her body was delivered to Ukraine. Forbidden Stories details the treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of wars and in some cases, civilians at the notorious Taganrog prison. This is where Victoriia ended up. The articles describes the prison as "synonymous with the most violent types of treatment imaginable, reminiscent of the worst Soviet gulags". According to former inmates, beatings, unimaginable torture and food deprivation were routine occurrences at the prison. They also faced punishment for speaking Ukrainian and some inmates ended up committing suicide as a result of the torture. In cinema news, Steven Spielberg has revealed what he thinks is the greatest film of all time. Screen Rant reports that the legendary director sys Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film "The Godfather" was the greatest movie of all time. In fact, it was so good that it shook his confidence as a director and almost made him not want to become one, according to Spielberg. A few years later though, "Jaws" came out and Spielberg's career took off. He, like Coppola, is part of the New Hollywood group of directors who brought filmmaking into the modern era. Finally, a pair of tennis fans have got engaged in the stands before Alex de Minaur and Lorenzo Musetti's Round of 16 match in the Madrid Open. It brings a whole new meaning to "love game"!
