CRUELTY AGAINST BIOSPHERE

DON’T JUST DEPLORE, RESTORE!

Highest Form Of Cruelty Cynically Fixed, If Need Be.

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Abstract: As Wikipedia puts it: “Cruelty can be described as indifference to suffering, and even positive pleasure in inflicting it. If this habit is supported by a legal or social framework, then it receives the name of perversion.” Several species disappear, each day. The biosphere has clearly entered its sixth great extinction, in 500 million years. And it’s caused by just one species, us.

Usually people evoke, a la Cousteau, the prospect of the sad, uninteresting world that their grandchildren will inherit to give themselves some moral spur to save the biosphere. This is a valid argument, at least to people who care about their grandchildren, real or imagined. 

But there is a more fundamental moral question.

Is it CRUEL to be indifferent to the suffering of the biosphere? Is destroying the biosphere a perversion of the degeneracy of  civilization that affects us? And if it is, why should we be surprised that this cruelty, once fully exercized and in great shape, does, of course, come out somewhere else, here, there, everywhere, to exert its horror on all things human?

There is a solution to the deterioration of the biosphere: restoration, on an industrial scale (you want to lower unemployment? Here you go!). Restoration does not mean just asking the Indians to save Asiatic Lions, the Chinese to save the Pandas, and Africans to be trampled by elephants. It means for the richest countries to take the burden directly, even more so.

To restore the biosphere is not just an esthetic and hedonistic necessity, but also a socio-economic necessity. Beyond this, restoring crucial elements of the life we are meant for, is a moral necessity, a psychological necessity, and even a neurobiological necessity.

The perverse society plutocracy is pushing on us is enabled by a loss of moral and common senses, both originating from cruelty against the biosphere.

(As I will hopefully explain in this and a companion essay.)

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CAN THOSE WHO ATTACK MOTHER EARTH FEEL GOOD?

Cruelty against various species is often condemned. However, although great prayers evoking lofty principles are always good, they can also immunize against effective action, by replacing the humble, mitigating task by self satisfaction. The sad fate of individual animals should not be used to occult a much more ominous fate, the assault against life itself.

That assault is fundamentally immoral, and that immorality has drastic consequences. They lay at the bottom of the present socio-economic crises, as I will show in this essay, and the next.  

Some will say:”Wait a minute, which moral system are you using? Certainly not Judeo-Christo-Islamism!” Ok, first there is no doubt that religions and moods such as found in the Indian sub-continent, all about the inter-connectivity of lives and life, have more expertise in their appreciation of the wealth of the biosphere. Spinoza and Schopenhauer, even Nietzsche, infused Indian thinking into their Western brew (since their thoughts are derivative, I will ignore them).

As my attack against Jainism below will show, I present as all encompassing a moral system closer to that of “First Nations“.  I don’t know of a name for it, but it’s the simplest thing. Maybe I should call it paleolithic morality.

“Mores” means long term habits, ways of doing things, which have proven sustainable.

So morality is what works in the long run for the continuation of the human experience.  Anything making human life unsustainable is immoral. Certainly the destruction of the biosphere qualifies as the ultimate immorality. Because without biosphere, man dies. And when everything dies everything, and everybody will suffer. And the indifference to that is the definition of cruelty.

Thus one can say that cruelty against various animals generalizes to a much higher form, CRUELTY AGAINST THE ENTIRE BIOSPHERE.

Instead of hounding businessmen who want to make a buck from the biosphere, much salvation, especially regarding the preservation of species, could be found, by carefully turning greed on its head.

Example: To save elephants, as a species, one should use their two greatest assets, and those are tourism (of course)  and…ivory. Otherwise elephants will disappear, because common people need very good reasons to learn to manage their lives with up to 11 metric tons beasts around, those mountains of irascible flesh capable of charging at 40 km/h through rice paddies (yes, there is native rice in Africa).

Making the biosphere profitable, by investing in it, is a high moral calling.

And if it means unsavory means, so be it. After all, people are known to go to the euphemistically named “restroom” everyday. The biosphere may be a temple, but Aztec style, with lots of blood. Invest in the biosphere, as it is, avert your senses, if need be.

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AUSTERITY DOES NOT WORK: DEPEND, SAYS THE BIOSPHERE!

Many ecologists have an anti-technology, anti-passion approach to the biosphere. They think AUSTERITY (that concept again) will solve it all. There is a Jainist side to them.

Jainism is the original version, 3,000 years old, of fanatical pacifism and ultra Buddhism. Its main idea, as practiced by its monks, is to have no dependency whatsoever. No dependency to love, even to their own parents. No dependency even to appreciating food, which is viewed only as a necessary fuel, as bland as possible. No dependency even to clothing, so they wear strictly none.

That works better in balmy India, rather than Siberia.

Jainism is superficially impressive. Its (naked) priests were already well known to pre-Socratic Greeks (who called them “gymnosophers“, that is the naked wise ones).

The silence of Greek philosophers is deafening. It’s not that the Greeks were afraid of nakedness: they exerted in the nude (gymnastics!). The Greeks could only feel that Jainism was mostly wrong. First because it denies the nature of Homo Sapiens, Earth’s ultimate predator. So it’s make belief. Even the rice the Jainist monks eat comes from violence. If Jainist monks want to be involved in absolutely no violence, they better stop eating. However, they would then commit violence against themselves. Jainism is a religion which tries to make us believe that lions can be angels, if they would just beg for grass and stop wearing clothing.

As a semi anecdote, Hitler wanted to be seen as a man of peace. That is the angle he found in Maynard Keynes’ “The Economic Consequences of Peace” (a German supremacy document that alleged that anything causing Germany umbrage was against peace!). So Hitler adopted the most sacred Jainist symbol, the Swastika (changing its red color to black, and putting the red around in a creative fit of his).

The fundamental intuitions of Jainism that we can just disconnect from the world, and that this is a good thing, are wrong, on both counts.

A baby depends upon love and adults, for years. All Jainists who ever existed started with love and dependency. Even Jesus had to acknowledge he needed a support system, when very little.

Of course one can deny co-dependency, and believe one is better than anybody else, that’s what the Nazis did, on an industrial scale. But that means one is either incapable of thinking correctly (co-dependency is a fact), or one hates all and any life. The Nazis proved both phenomena can happen at the same time (and Merkel is trying her best to demonstrate the same point again).

But that’s a mistake, austerity is anti-life, dependency the way, the biosphere is about exuberance, passion, experiments. Life is about the Red Queen Hypothesis (Alice asks the Red Queen why they are running the landscape does not move, and the queen explains they have to run, just to stay in place). Don’t go Jain on us, that’s what mussels do, and we are not mussels.

Life is all about maximum interdependence, no holds barred, it’s about bursting out of the biosphere, and death itself (French researchers just found that muscular stem cells keep the entire rebirth capability, 17 days after “death”, and out of one of these apparently dead cells, a million new ones could be born).

The most developed world should reintroduce dangerous megafauna. A new industry, another new way to fight unemployment (same as the old one, during eons passed, when the genus Homo was already the manager of life, at least on land).

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THE SUFFERING MOON BEARS: YES, BUT HOW MUCH?

I had not heard of all the charms of Traditional Chinese Medicine. However Sherryn Groch revealed to me in “Raging Against Cages“  an industry that I never suspected existed: extracting bile from caged bears. One gram of bile sells for $20 (that is half the price of gold)… Here we have a piece of nature with a high market value. From the BBC’s China bear bile farms stir anger among campaigners:

“In a secretly shot video, a Chinese farmer holds up a bag of yellowish bile he has just extracted from a caged bear.

“Some Westerners say this is cruel – but I think the bears are making a contribution to mankind,” says the grinning man.

Animal welfare groups have recently stepped up their campaign to end the practice of milking bears for their bile, still legal in China. They say the animals suffer enormous physical and psychological pain.

But bear bile has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and it is not proving easy to change habits formed over generations. Pharmaceutical companies that farm bears are also fighting back to protect their industry, in a public relations battle to win hearts and minds.”  

Sherryn exhibits gruesome cases, which could clearly be outlawed for extreme cruelty against an advanced animal, the Asian Black Bear (“Moon Bears“).

Sun Bears, and the much larger Moon Bears, are tropical bears, all black, except for a big white crescent moon on their chests. Animals like these are part of the megafauna, and, as man replaces primary forest everywhere with furniture, palm plantations, asphalt, they are threatened with extinction.

Outlawing all and any bear farming is very honorable, at first sight, a bit like when Gandhi proclaimed that he did not want India to take part in World War Two. A honorable end: peace at any cost.

Never mind that if Hitler’s henchmen had their way, they would have stuffed the likes of Gandhi in an oven. If the means destroy the ends, are the ends worth pursuing?

Indeed, there is another side to the whole question. The Asian Black Bears are a “threatened” species. Yet, officially pharmaceutical companies in China hold 10,000! Some want to hold even more, and be listed on stock exchanges.

Says the BBC: “…. [a] company opened its doors to journalists – the BBC was not allowed in – to counter claims that its business is cruel.

Reporters were shown bears playing in a pit and others being milked for their bile by workers dressed in face masks and protective clothing. The bears appeared comfortable and unconcerned by the procedure.

At a news conference, company director Zhang Zhijun said making a hole in a bear’s abdomen was no different to “piercing people’s ears”.”

The notion that the pain can be so small should be judicially explored. If it is demonstrated, then the business ought to be tightly regulated, but kept legal. And I am going to explain why.

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SAVE PRESTIGIOUS SPECIES BY CAGING THEM IF NECESSARY:

A few years back, a company asked for authorization to farm a nearly completely disappeared species of sea turtles. They intended to grow thousands, although only a few hundreds were left in the wild. As the mortality, in the wild, is more than one adult turtle for 1,000 baby turtles, from predation, it’s easy to save sea turtles, if one raise them on a farm. They were refused. (I did not follow the story after that.)

Generally conservation organizations make the silly argument that it is more important to save the environment, and that, if one saves the most prestigious species in captivity, people will be less motivated to save entire ecological system. (Merkel makes a similar argument: better a dead patient, pour encourager les autres.)

However this is exactly how the California Condor was saved. Instead of waiting for the South West USA to return to wilderness, state conservationists captured all the condors, and bred them in captivity. They are now back in the wild, over several states. (Still dying from lead pellets, though.)

I do think that one should encourage the (as non cruel as possible) farming of some species threatened by extinction presently (say some sea turtles, sharks, etc.). As is done with some saurians (there are highly successful crocodile farms; crocodiles in farms are so well nourished and content that they do not practice cannibalism, differently from their common practice in the grand outdoors.)

I do not mean one should kill dolphins, because they are good to eat. Japan should stop killing whales. One should draw the line somewhere, with sentient animals. (Although I have seen Africans butcher dolphins, as they have always done traditionally to feed themselves; they should be allowed to keep on doing so, under legal monitoring, as is done with “first nations” Arctic hunters and sea mammals).

The case of elephants is different: dolphins or whales are innocuous to humans, and do not live where people do, whereas elephants, who are as intelligent, need another reason to justify their encumbering existence, in the midst of humans, because they are very dangerous, if not carefully managed (that means half domesticated; wild elephants can be domesticated, they are that intelligent).

In general saving prestigious species helps to remind common people how prestigious the environments they came from, as a species, were. Thus reintroducing the prestigious species is conducive to re-introducing said environment. For example California is making efforts to be ecologically correct enough so that condors can survive. Little things, such as leaving enough carcasses.

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THE GREATER CRIME: EXTINCTION.

There are three crimes often committed nowadays against the animal kingdom:

1) the cruelty to individual animals. (Princeton philosophy professor Singer has waxed lyrically, not to say rather grotesquely, on the subject, with the base, not to say deranged, argument that, since people are animals, animals are people. Or something akin to that.)

2) the cruelty to the biosphere, by amputating it of its species. If one thinks about it carefully, literally, etymologically speaking, exterminating a species is genocide (it kills genes!). Some will say I torture semantics, but, if one insists to torture the biosphere, the following will happen:

3) inuring ourselves to being cruel and devastating to the biosphere, and the termination of species. That will make the commission of genocide something normal. We will start with bugs, and, when we run out of bugs, we will treat human beings as we treated the bugs (yes, this is a reasoning similar to Singer’s, and Singer falls exactly in that pit, like the mammoth he is). Call that psychological inertia: commit cruelty here, consider it normal, carry it somewhere else.

2) and 3) are arguably higher category moral wrongs than the cruelty against individual creatures. It’s torture against creation itself.

Farming wild species may often be the way out. For example, saving rhinoceroses by large scale farming beats the disappearance of the species, anytime. As it turns out, rhinoceroses readily domesticate (they were even used militarily, because they are highly combative. ).

Farming wild species may also necessitate saving enormous areas of wilderness (say if one were raising elephants for ivory). Hunting ranches in Texas are said to have more of some subspecies of tigers than there are left in the wild.

Another example is Spanish fighting bulls used for corrida de toros. They constitute a breed of their own. To cultivate their ferocity, they are brought up wild. For human reasons (bullfighting is cruel, at least at some terminal point, for beast, and, or, man alike) corrida may well be outlawed (as it just was in Catalonia). Then the breed will certainly disappear.

In general species without any commercial interest whatsoever may well disappear. Better sell a sea turtle soup, than to see the species the soup is made from, disappear forever.

A related activity would be to displace threatened species to places where they would have much more room. My preferred example would be to transfer surplus zoo Amur leopards to Yukon national parks (reducing if need be the local mountain lions’ population).

In conclusion, developing commercial interests to save elements of the biosphere is not crime, but virtue and (short term) solution.

Reciprocally, preventing the rise of legitimate, lawful, well regulated businesses, augments even more the commercial value of organized crime, and is leading to the present disappearance of many species.

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NO DANGEROUS LIFE WITHOUT HIGH INCENTIVES:

The main reason Asian Black Bears are eliminated is that they are very dangerous. They are known to attack people without provocation, viciously and lethally. As someone who got charged twice by black bears (in the American West), and had many all too close calls (as a solo mountain runner), I can testify that only lions I fear more (OK, I have never run among grizzlies, and did not try it when I could, fishing proved dangerous enough).

If Asians are not given very good pecuniary reasons to keep dangerous predators around, they simply will not. True there are lots of national parks in the USA, but they are mostly in the empty west, and the really dangerous predators, such as grizzlies, and the equivalent of tigers and lions, have long been eliminated. The progressive return of the wolf is highly resisted.

Large animals tend to be deadly. A small, 5 kilogram shark is not a problem. It is a problem when it is 100 times more massive. The lethality of some species calls to actively manage them, and thus to make them profitable to:

1) pay for said management.

2) give a considerable incentive for the population to live cautiously, if not dangerously.

Elephants in Sri Lanka constitute a particular subspecies.  Under human pressure, they have quickly become smaller in the last two centuries. Without careful management, they are terrifying, and dangerous neighbors.

There are at least 5,000 elephants, there used to be 15,000 two centuries ago. They particularly like the rich alluvial plain, best for rice farmers and their families. Often girls come back from school and have to stop before getting home, terrified by a trumpeting band of irate multi tons quadrupeds in the distance. More than 100 elephants a year are killed to protect crops and houses. Their habitat is extremely fragmented.

An extensive government monitoring and teaching program, complete with frightening pachyderms at night with firecrackers, has established some modus vivendi. However, that program is expensive, and will survive if, and only if watching elephants can be turned into such a profitable tourist activity, that it pays for itself. Blatantly.

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RESTORE NATURE AS IT EVOLVED TO BE. IN GIANT PARKS EVERYWHERE:

Speaking of elephants brings attention to the hypocrisy of much of the North Atlantic countries will be exposed. Large species related to elephants, mastodons and mammoths, used to roam present say NATO. Agreed, they were a threat. But also a resource. NATO now has the technology to enjoy the resource, and keep the threat in check.

There used to be mammoths, wooly rhinoceroses, and elks with antlers 3 meters across all over Europe. Men eliminated them all in the last 14,000 years. The extermination started with the (giant) Cave Bears, about 50,000 years ago. Thank the Neanderthals for that.

Up to 3,000 years ago, European Lions were still found in Western Europe. Aurochs survived until the 17C. Lions and tigers were still in the Caucasus-Caspian area up to very recently. The Atlas lion, a larger species, survived until the 20C. Poison nearly completely eliminated Brown Bears in Europe (the ancestors of American Grizzlies), and wolves (who are coming back, big time).

So is Europe going to show the way, and re-introduce what it used to enjoy? Real big dangerous animals? Experiments in France (reintroducing prehistoric horses and bison) show that nature becomes completely different, taking more the appearance of a park, like the African savannah park (for the same reason). 

Homo sapiens has eliminated megafauna on most continents. Australia had many large animals (marsupial “lion”, marsupial “rhinoceros”). Men arrived by boats, killed them all. Ever since Australian ecology has been out of balance (in spite of dingoes to play predators).

Notice that the usual anti-idea that the climate fluctuations and attending vegetation change truly killed the megafauna do not hold for Australia: the extent of glaciation in Australia was rather reduced (to put it ironically). Verily, it’s the other way around. It is likely that killing (most of the) megafauna changed the vegetation, and maybe even the climate.

Exterminating “lions” allowed the cattle to multiply. This is what Neolithic herders wanted. However, differently from lions (previously the most frequent species, as they eat everything, from rabbit up), cattle make a lot of methane, CH4, the powerful greenhouse gas. Thus the first man made greenhouse. It may have prevented a return of a little glaciation.

It’s high time to reverse all this, and restore megafauna. Before being able to re-create the original species, stand-ins ought to be brought in. Elephants and rhinoceroses have been suggested for Australia, be it only to reduce the (African) Gamba grass (a giant grass, meters tall, made to burn spectacularly. I have seen some of these brush fires in the park-savannah).  Australia had a full megafauna, with rhinoceros sized ”giant wombats“, and predators to control them. It disappeared 50,000 years ago, as Homo Sapiens invaded (that disappearance led, in turn, to climate change… this, please notice, is the exact opposite to what Conventional Wisdom is paid to babble about).

The full panoply of prehistoric animals ought to be reintroduced, say in Europe. OK, none of the ancient animals has been yet recreated, using genetic engineering (although some Japanese have just such a plan for mammoths). However some animals close to extinction such as the Amur Leopard, the Siberian Tiger could be reintroduced in safe places, along the lines of the reintroduction of the California Condor.

And yes, some of these places ought to be in Western Europe. Britain could start by reintroducing the wolf, exterminated in the 17C (the UK has signed a treaty to this effect, but “forgot” to implement it).

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RESTORE THE HUMAN MINDS, IN FULL:

Why should we restore wild nature? As I said above, to abate cruelty, restore morality. However it goes much further than that, as I evoked in the abstract. That will be the second part of this essay, where spectacular connections with neurobiology, neurohormonology, institutional cycles, and the present civilizational crisis will be established.

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Patrice Ayme

Luke 19:27

Don’t Ask What God Can Do For You, Ask Who You Can Kill In His Name?

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Recently Abrahamism demonstrated its mighty hold on the minds of those who want to commit horror. A 23 year old French Muslim killed three French paratroopers, one of them from Martinique (what American racists would call “black“), and the other two Muslim, as it turned out (one of them a Franco-Moroccan).

One of the unarmed Muslim paratrooper treachorously assassinated was called Mohammed, just like the killer. Then Mohammed Mehra killed three children, and a dad protecting his two sons, at a Jewish school. He benefitted from the help of other Muslim fanatics. Dozens got arrested. All indications are that Mohammed Mehra was just a little creep. He was arrested many times for various exactions unrelated to religion. There is a video of him, laughing to no end, beaming with an angel face, after making a rodeo with a BMW.

More children were wounded, but they survived the horrible wounds. It is useful to peer into the horror. Not by voyeurism, but to see how deep hatred can go.

One of the children, a seven year old girl, was hit in the shoulder by a .45 colt of the U.S. Army (!). The Muslim fanatic, filming the assassination with a camera strapped on his belly, chased her, grabbed her by her pony tail. Then he brought the gun to her head, and fired. But the gun jammed. Instead of listening to Allah’s hint, still holding onto her, he got another gun he had, released the safety, and killed her.

This sort of violence, I claim, is intrinsic to Abrahamism (“Judeo-Christo-Islamism”). It’s what it was made for, and by. It’s no coincidence that Islam created the greatest empire ever seen, in a few years: by the sword, for the sword.

The lunatics are getting agitated. In the extract below, published in the electronic version of a newspaper read by millions, a fanatic ponders about my case:

Mr. belal zakaria asks me in the Wall Street Journal, whether Satan is hiding behind me. Here is Mr. Zakaria’s quote, complete with savage grammar, Saturday, March 31, 2012:

• @patrice ayme
• Who is hiding behind you like satan (also a light in wavelength and angstrom) misleading using wordpress.com and Abraham with illicit comment of Mental illness of Abraham? The following abraham proof of prostration given 1400 yrs like moon splitting Surah Moon …
• In all muslim prayers, Muslim seek refuge from misleader 5/times per day world wide for reason Obvious.”

Is organized superstition a mental illness “for reason obvious”?

Abraham is the mythical founder of Judaism. He is famous for agreeing with a voice in his head telling him to kill his son. Hence Abraham is the founder of Christianism five centuries later, and Islamism, another six centuries after that.

Muhammad got advice about founding Islam from several Christian family members, including his cousin, a professional Christian monk, who told him he had obviously encountered the Archangel Gabriel in the desert. That’s how the whole Islam (“Submission“) thing got to roll…

Submission to whom? That is the question. Well, to the boss. Abraham was the ultimate sucker: to please his boss, he was ready to kill his son. The Abrahamists adulate him for that. Bosses, naturally, founded a religion around the idea.

Once a French catholic girl told me:”Christianism is the religion of love.” For her it was a fact, not a theory. She overlooked three things:

1) love has long existed, since there are brainy animals, and they breed. Thus, those who need Christianism to love may be mentally diseased.

2) Millions were killed in the name of Christianism. And not just by Christians roasting Muslim children for sustenance in the Middle East, or wadding, knee deep in blood in Jerusalem (both facts related by the best Christian eyewitnesses). No, millions were killed by Christians, in Europe, killing Christians who, they believe, did not believe correctly. By the way, I am (formally) a Christian, so, if I get killed by an Abrahamist, it will be more of the same: I did not believe correctly, according to my own co-religionists.

The civil war  in Syria is, first of all, a religious war between fanatics. Between Abrahamists. So far, 10,000 killed and counting. Assad’s dictatorship rests mostly on the (legitimate) fear for their lives some sectarians such as Christians and Alawites have of the (majority) Sunnis. When the Arabs invaded the area, it was entirely Christian. Then there were massacres, and oppression. Some of these massacres were between some particular Muslims (“Sunni”), and the partisans (“Shia”) of Ali (hence Alawites). This is what happened in the last 13 centuries.   

3) In the Bible’s Old Testament, there are many calls to murder. And so it is, more discreetly in the New Testament. Here is Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, indeed, a prophet of Islam, ordering to kill non believers. Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

How loving is that?

When people say that Jesus is love, they, either, did not read the Bible, in which case they talk for sure about what they certainly don’t know, so they are liars. Or, then they think slaughtering those who do not believe the way they like is cool.

In the later case, Abrahamism, as most other mass superstitions, would be a mental disease induced to better exploit the naive in a systemic fashion by making them goose step behind the notion that their superiors even know how the universe works.

Organized superstition is organized stupidity. The way Abrahamism originally had it, it’s organized stupidity with evil intent.

Stupidity is a force against which the gods themselves contend in vain. It is also, in the case of Abrahamism, organized calls to murder. In the case of the Bible and the Qur’an, there are many clear appeals to murder (you can go the site below to read the quotes in the Qur’an:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

I never got around listing the same for Christianity, from lack of time.

Some have followed these calls to murder, for centuries, killing millions. There are also appeals to peace, true. But that’s irrelevant, once you are dead. The truth is, Christianism was imposed by emperor Constantine, viewed by a saint by the catholic Orthodox, and who viewed himself as the “13th apostle”. Among others, he killed his nephew, ordered his son executed (without bothering to give a reason), and boiled his wife (no reason either).

If Nero had founded a religion, the same ones would be probably worshipping that. (Nero assassinated his mother, but she was a well known plotter, had basically reigned as an Augusta, and poisoned her husband Claudius. So she was not that innocent. Constantine, by killing the righteous for no good reason, was more Satanic, on the face of it, thus better qualified to found the world upside down, as the Cathars noticed.)

Now, predictably, some of the fanatics roll out people who made a scientific career who were themselves fanatics. Salam, a physics Nobel, was an example (some said he did not deserve his Nobel, BTW). He called the Qur’an “the most beautiful book that ever was“. I guess, complete with the call for the destruction of the unbelievers.

One who is often rolled out: — John Polkinghorne, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge.

That Christian fanatic famously wrote that:

“only in the media, and in the popular and polemical scientific writing, does there persist the myth of the light of pure scientific truth confronting the darkness of obscurantist religious error.
No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science.
People who tell you that ‘Science tells you everything you need to know about the world’ or ‘Science tells you that religion is all wrong’ or ‘Science tells you there is no God’, those people aren’t telling you scientific things. They are saying metaphysical things and they have to defend their positions from metaphysical reasons.”

Against stupidity and criminality, the gods themselves contend in vain.

Science is about what is true. Science cannot yet prove when people are lying. Science says nothing, globally, about superstition. At least, so far. We have no proof, yet, that those who really believe that god tell them to kill somebody are mad. The secular law does not treat them as criminals, early enough.

The only adverse relationship between superstition and science is that the same form of critical intelligence that built science, if applied to superstition, shows that it is wrong.

For example: twins have different fates. Exit astrology.

For example: that hearsay from some analphabetic epileptic in the desert, 14 centuries ago, with a chip on his shoulder from his analphabetism, and living from his wife’s business, is enough for a proof of a theory of the universe stretches the imagination of all, but the most stupid.

For example: people go on their knees, and evoke Jesus. But there is no record of his life (at a time when there were plenty of records, and at a time when there were the record of the execution of several Jesus like characters, in the same region).

Enormous histories like that of the Jewish general Josephus, written 7 years after Saint Paul’s writings, evoke plenty of pseudo-prophets, but not Jesus. On the usual strict criterions of objective history, Jesus never existed.

And in the first Christian writings, Saint Paul writes, black on white, that he “never met Jesus in person, except inside his own head”…It’s a hint if there ever was one..

Whereas mass superstition is organized stupidity, science is organized intelligence.

But, to practice science, one does not need to be particularly intelligent. And to be famous in science, one can just be lucky, or, like Einstein, present a lot of other people’s work as one’s own.
So professor Polkinghorne can say whatever he wants. There were very bright people goose stepping murderously behind Hitler. Including several Nobel Prize Laureates (Lenard), and super smart young mathematicians (Teichmuller an example). Locally intelligent, globally stupid. Certainly abject and criminal.

And what was Nazism? Why was Nazism so keen to kill Jews, and how come it succeeded so well? Well, just look at the history of Christianism, and at the belts of the SS: “Goot Mit Uns!” God With US! was written there. The first century of imperial Christianism was little more than a massacre of everything, and everybody non Christian.

Nine years after the last SS was killed in combat for his fanatical cause, the U.S. Congress adopted the motto of the SS. Amen.

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Patrice Ayme
–

No Law Up High, No Republic

ULTIMATE AUTHORITY OF THE REPUBLIC RESTS ON THE LAW.

Is Government Too Separated From The Authority That matters Most?

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The planet we have is increasingly ravaged by several conflating crises. Burned by the carbonic acid created by excess carbon dioxyde absorbed by the oceans, young fishes die, go blind or become crazy, as bees do on land. The plancton, which fabricates the oxygen we need, is dissolving in the acid bath we used to call a sea.

But the fossil fuel polluters’ crimes are not even fiscally discouraged. Instead they are allowed to also spew lies, and persuade everybody that there will be plenty of air for ever (see the financing of the Tea party in the USA by the Koch brothers).

Meanwhile, the grip financial pirates have on the world has become obvious since 2008. After they seized the world economy, they asked for a ransom. And then again, And it was paid again. Now the serfs are asked to pay for distant banks by allowing themselves to become destitute (and this is happening even inside prosperous Germany, where old retirees discover they have to go back to work!)

Ever since the amazing financial crisis which grips the planet came to everybody’s attention in 2008, it has become obvious that a handful of men in suits take all the decisions with the money, and even the fate, of the public, allowing their class to thrive ever more, while, and because, the public deperishes.

The spirit of the law, if not its letter, has been denied.

I claim that this comes directly from the fact that the executive branch has eluded its responsibilities in implementing the spirit of the law. This is not just a question of the present leaders being plutophile  (lovers of Pluto, thus, wealth). Institutionally, the way executive powers are presently set-up, has less to do with wielding justice than it had under the Roman republic.

Western democracy, led by the English, American and French revolutions of the preceding centuries, consists of representative democracies with three branches of government: the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive. Legislation is established by a bicameral parliament of elected representatives (an inheritance from 6,500 years old Sumer).

In a purely parliamentary system, parliament also elects the executive. In the USA, France and Russia, a powerful president is elected directly (by a college of a few hundred special electors in the USA, by the people in France or Russia).

In any case, the judiciary is supposed to be separated from the executive. It is not clear what this exactly means: after all, most judges are nominated by the executive in the USA, and confirmed by the legislative. In other countries (e.g. France) the judiciary self nominates.

So the judiciary is a bit more independent in France: see the Dreyfus affair, where the independent judiciary forced the executive, the army and the anti-Judaists to eat crow. What I will contest here is not the independence of the judiciary, but its power: an ant may be independent, but it is easily crushed by a plutocrat.

In the USA no judge is powerful enough to judge the obvious, namely that the Federal reserve has no right to transfer arbitrary amounts of “monetary base” to the same old crooks, year after year (although a judge recently blocked an all too comfortable accord between the government and a major bank).

The difference in judicial independence between France and the USA shows: the popular Chirac, 12 year president, and Prime Minister before that, was condemned to two years in prison (suspended). For allowing City Hall finances as Paris mayor to provide supporters with somewhat fictitious jobs with real salaries. The offense is so puny, it would not really register on American radar.

The Roman republic was not organized this way. In Rome, the top executives, the two Consuls, were also viewed as the top judicial officers. Why so? It is very simple: the republic rested on the law.

No law, no republic. That had to make the law more important than anything else, including the army. Military power could be used if, and only if, it was legal. The law was the highest value, and thus the highest authorities took care of it. The founders of the Roman republic saw this clearly. Justice was not a department, it was the foundation.

The superpower of the Consuls was compensated by the shortness of their terms: just a year. But they could be re-elected. Gaius Marius was elected seven times Consul. Ex-Consuls were called proconsular officers. They were frequently nominated governors of provinces, and had many prerogatives, including being protected by lictors, special trained bodyguards carrying the axes of the fasces representing the union of the Populus around the power of the law.  

When there was war, it was made in the name of the law, under the eye of the law, as the Consuls often personally directed the operations of the main armies (many Roman Consuls died in combat, over a millennium).

Let’s remember that a mostly functional Roman republic lasted about 5 centuries. And arguably for much longer: after all, there were Consuls, and a Roman Senate, for more than 11 centuries! The founder of Francia, elected king and imperator Clovis, was also Roman Consul. Stretched to the max, a Roman state existed for 23 centuries (753 BCE to 1453 CE).

So where does the system we have presently come from? How come justice got separated from the executive? The break happened around the 13th century. In England, the French barons limited the power of the king through the Charter of Liberties (1100 CE) and the Magna Carta (1215 CE): their ancestors had joined William The Conqueror, a Duke, (that is a high commander in the Roman army of the Late Empire), to invade England, bringing with them most of the (French) army that invaded England. William had been recognized as first among equals, and the descendants of his acolytes intended not to forget that fact.

In France the break came later. Elizabeth de France, the ferocious intelligent and domineering daughter of Philippe IV Le Bel had become reigning queen of England (having visited an unspeakable end to the father of her four children, a Plantagenet, Edward II). When her brothers all died, she ought to have become (absolute) queen of France too. She, and her son, the war like Edward III, were blocked by lawyers (her father had already rested heavily on lawyers, in his hunt for popes and Templars: his closest executors were lawyers). This is how the 475 year long “100 years war” started.

So parliaments rose, ever higher, taking judicial power away from the executive. By the time of the French revolution, England, France and the Netherlands had long seen the judicial system become nearly completely autonomous of the executive. The Bastille was stormed in France to take away from the king the last shred of Roman like power the executive had on the implementation of the law.

After the English, American and French revolutions, too much of the new system has still more to do with the monarchies that preceded it, than with the Roman republican system. The chief executive was elected for longish terms, as if it were a monarch, and directly from the legislature. In other words, the parliament now elected the kings (and queens).

Here a comical aside. The USA elects its president as if he were the Roman emperor. The Imperium Romanum officially re-established by Charlemagne in 800 CE, made Holy under Barabarossa (German: Heiliges Römisches Reich, Latin: Imperium Romanum Sacrum) indeed elected its head from a college of “grand electors“. Thus in 2001, the People elected Gore president, but the plutophile Supreme Court selected Bush, instead. (Perhaps the point when, in the future, the USA will be seen has having given in to the Dark Side!)

The representative democracy, separation of powers system is viewed unanimously as fine and good. (Although Switzerland, the oldest democracy around, uses less representation, and more direct rule of the people.)

But the question remains: when a massive injustice arises, quickly and powerfully, who can handle it? Who is going to deliver maximum power in the name of the law defending the People? In other words, when executive power is needed to re-establish the law, how can the meek executives we now have, thoroughly checked and balanced, exert the required power? America’s Founding Fathers were obsessed by checks and balances, but, although Founding Father Washington became filthy rich (317 slaves in his Mount Vernon house!), the Founding Fathers had no idea what real plutocracy was like. The only plutocrats they knew were in England, and that was judged to be an ocean away.

President Andrew Jackson, one the fiercest generals ever, had a better idea. He hated the Rothschilds (great practitioners of fractional reserve banking, who considered themselves the real power behind the thrones in Europe). Jackson prevented their implantation in the USA. Next he disintegrated the Bank of the United states, and considered that, on his deathbed, to be his greatest achievement. If he was around, as chief executive, he would probably occupy Wall Street and Congress with twenty divisions, the next day.

There are still remnants of the old Roman power the Consuls had: Obama, executing Ben Laden, for example. That was well accepted, because that was overseas (and even below the sea).

Besides Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Roosevelt Teddy, and FDR, another one who took himself for a Roman consul, was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. But all those powers they grabbed, as needed, were not really the appanage of the presidency of the USA. The water was boiling, so the frog jumped out. Right now, the temperature is slowly rising, and normal powers, in normal circumstances are not enough to address the various problems. That is made plenty clear with the European banking crisis, the on-going financial crisis all over the world (even… in China!), and the ecological crisis (which the USA resolutely refuses to consider, thus undermining everybody).

In the present financial crisis, and in the ecological crisis at some point, overwhelming power will be needed. The only question is to know if the power will be military, and extraordinary, Lincoln style, or civilian and legal.

The spirit of the law has to be defended. For example against the financial derivative universe (which has no collateral, which means the unsuspecting public is the collateral; see lower down).

Too many checks and balances for the power of the People, and all you end with, is the power of the plutocracy.

The arch-example: Geithner and Bernanke directed untold trillions of dollars towards the banks which had caused the crisis, but asked for nothing in return. At that point a strong executive ought to have stepped in and declare that this fabulous gift violated the principle of the law, which is that the republic does not make gifts to private parties, without compensation. Especially when the beneficiaries are the perpetrators.

(The gifts had started under Paulson and Bush II, when the daemon Dimon was offered 30 billion dollars by the fed, collateralized by what he was buying (!!!) to help him swallow Bear-Sterns, the “Jamie deal“. Thus, Dimon is viewed as a genius. When the state gives in to the daemon, crepuscule of goodness!)

The financial crisis has been allowed to roll on because a general laxity about the law. The laxity is fed even by videogames.

The Red Cross pointed out that in the world’s most popular, most sold videogames, the Geneva Conventions rules were not just violated, but gamers get rewarded for violating them. A whole generation is being raised, feeling that one gains 50 points by shooting on ambulances. The Red Cross wants to change this. The Red Cross is right. The plutocrats and their corporations facing them, making billions from a bloody obsession with an alternate reality, will beg to differ. Not only they make a fortune from violating the most basic morality. But those daemons know quite well that the games they sell preach violations of the law, and also violations of civilization itself.

The acceptance of barbarity, as a way to get ahead, the plutocrats meekly hope, will bring more of the abject world in which, and by which, they thrive.

The mood of the times is important: pathetic plutocrats have gone around, requesting the respect they have come to expect. Meanwhile the law is symbolically stepped on. In the last three years, both the French and American presidents, both trained lawyers, violated in public, the very first thing about the law, namely the presumption of innocence (this is not a good example for the inchoating republics of Ukraine and Russia, where the law is obviously used to hunt the loyal opposition!)

The presumption of innocence says that even suspects are innocent until proven otherwise by a proper legal procedure. The presumption of innocence protects freedom, every body’s freedom, not just the freedom of suspects or criminals.

President Sarkozy claimed that former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was “guilty”… although Villepin was later found completely innocent. President Obama, having maybe talked to Sarkozy too much, declared that soldier Bradley Manning, who is accused to have shown the truth to the public, had “broken the law”, as his trial started.

However, as commander in chief, Obama is the ultimate authority for the military tribunal which judges Manning. Constitutionally, he cannot pose as judge and accuser.

(Let’s note in passing that the Nazi government had given orders to not prosecute soldiers who had refused to obey orders, on the ground of violations of human rights. The Nazis were afraid that any official prosecution would shine a light on their violations of human rights, the Geneva Conventions, and German law! It is rather curious that the government of the USA is too arrogant to even be as wise as that…)

Methinks that it is not that Sarkozy and Obama have early Alzheimer, and forgot the very first thing about the law.

Instead I believe that they feel they live in times where anyone up high can get away with everything (witness the enormous transfers of wealth to the hyper rich under their reigns, transfers which threaten the very thrones on which they sit, but the establishments upon which they rule feel they could get away with it, and that there is no other way… Although Sarkozy may soon understand his error, especially when, after losing the next election, French judges start to investigate him in earnest…) 

Is a new age of connivance upon us?

Justice without the determination, or capability to impose it, is no justice.

We just had a beautiful example in Italy: Berlusconi, highest judicial officer of the Italian republic, if one looks at his job in the fullness of the authority inherited from Rome, as one should, refused to prosecute the Mafia energetically. He failed to arrest top mafiosi. Berlusconi was barely gone for a few days, replaced by Mario Monti, a former university president, that the head of the Camorra was arrested (after 15 years living in a bunker in Naples).

It cannot be otherwise according to the spirit of the French and American constitutions: the highest authorities of the state are, have to be, first of all, the highest judicial authorities. It is no accident that leech known as finance is so strong in London, where the Prime Minister has fewer powers (not being head of state, to start with; and according to Rothschild, circa 1820, not the real power in Britain.)

Such disregard for the basics, for the strict letter of the law, I suggest, comes precisely from a general mood which tramples the basics of republican civilization. Or then from having a plutocratic agenda. But to believe that, in the age of the Internet, plutocracy can win over democracy, is itself fiction of the highest order. As people get more and more informed, the transition to a military regime will have to take just a generation, and not five, as it did in Rome. 

To re-establish democracy fully, it will be primordial to realize that the highest authority of the republic is the law, or, more generally the spirit behind it: WE THE PEOPLE.

And the highest officials of the republic have to incarnate it. Maybe we want to have a second look at the institution of consul. Shorter terms of the higher officials (as in Switzerland), with more of a judicial mission may help in blocking the plutocrats. France is also going to imitate Switzerland and California, and make referenda possible, upon popular request. Switzerland has imposed on its banks twice the Basel III reserve requirements. And it is said that the Fed with impose Basel III to its financial daemons; that sounds technical, but, when the banks have not enough reserves, they find them among the unsuspecting public, and then the economy tanks. (It is amazing that not imposing Basel III on American banks was contemplated!)

The derivative markets use enormous leverage (say 25 trillion of net positions out of a notional 700 trillions total, at least that is what the industry claims, giving a leverage of about 30!) But the institutions using them have no collateral. Thus, in case of failure of one, the entire world financial system will come down (as exactly happened when AIG was 200 billion short in 2008). But nobody has had the authority mental, judiciary or political to stop the non sense.

How did Rome fall? The republic faded, Rome became increasingly a fascist empire where justice could not be visited on the mightiest. An intractable financial crisis developed. Its fundamental cause was the refusal of the plutocracy to pay taxes to the Roman state, while its agents were busy disempowering Rome and Italy (to avoid a revolt back to the republic). Since the plutocracy ruled, there was no way out.

Emperor Septimus Severus, a general of at least half Libyan ancestry born in Libya, knew the problem well, and hated the Senate (headquarters of the plutocracy). But he could not fight it.

A man, even an emperor, cannot fight a mood. Only philosophers can do so. But, by the time of Septimus Severus, it was too late for philosophy. All this, because it had become a self serving habit of the mighiest to not apply the law to those who had become too big to fail, too big to flail.

Ultimately, it was a new people’s philosophy, from Germania, which was to transmogrify the ruling mood, and the empire, three centuries later. In the new ruling mood, plutocracy and slavery were out. So the entire economy rested again on small farmers, just as it did in the early Roman republic (those new, northern farmers cultivated the rich heavy soil of the colder, wetter oceanic climes with the new technology of heavy steel ploughs pulled by oxen… or horse).

It would take a few centuries for Western civilization to reach higher than Rome ever did.

But we don’t have that kind of time, we don’t have centuries to change moods, and rebuild on a more sustainable basis: remember the methane bubbling in the arctic. And plutocracy is not that ingrained yet: it is nothing that a 90% tax on the very rich, Eisenhower style, cannot fix.

(In Rome, using the Trojan Horse of foreign wars of choice (around 146 BCE), the plutocracy was able to acquire private armies which were above the law. Right now, it is just short of that. Only its business practices are above the law, and the states have been captured to allow them. But a nasty war or two (say, starting with Iran) could fix the problem.)

Applying the law can change the world. As I said for years, mercury pollution from coal burning, kills tens of thousands of lives every year and causes birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases among millions of survivors. And this in the USA alone (compare with the civilian nuclear industry, which did not kill one member of the public yet, in the USA: is the hysterical anti-nuclear crowd paid by fossil fuel polluters?)

Finally Obama, apparently remembering some of what he is supposed to do, has unleashed the EPA onto the coal burners. It remains, though, to do the same worldwide (worldwide carbon tax, worldwide mercury tax). And if the polluters in China can’t adapt fast enough, let’s tax them into extinction! Why should they be allowed to put mercury vapor in the air, and ruin our brains? Is not that a casus belli?

The mercury pollution is just a small example of the following. At this point justice, the republic, and the spirit of the law, is not just a matter of taste, but a matter of survival.

***

Patrice Ayme

EVIL IS WITH US, BUT IT CAN BE GOOD.

(Pun intended.)

HOWEVER, NO EVIL OUGHT TO BE LEFT UNTURNED TO CONDEMN GENOCIDAL SINKERS, & THEIR INSANE NIHILISM.

***

In brief: Genocidal thinking itself is now promoted in some elite American universities, and widely disseminated by the New York Times. This is the highest imaginable nihilism. To decry it, one needs to foray further than Nietzsche ever did. So I introduce a new instinct, beyond the Will To Power, the Rage To Exterminate. This is an occasion to expose bits and pieces of a new theory of evil. Nihilism, deliberately stupid, is the worst. Indeed, against deliberate stupidity, evil itself contends in vain.

***

Abstract: LOVE HOPES FOR THE BEST, BUT SOMETIMES, ONLY EVIL, AT ITS BEST, CAN MAKE IT SO.

A number of leading American philosophers from superior universities, Singer and Mc Mahan, claim that massive genocide is an acceptable solution. Never mind that there was no drastic problem asking for this draconian solution. The mood is turning ugly in the USA. It is the first time in the history of civilization where salaried philosophers come right out in the favor of genocide. Even Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi philosopher, never expressed himself that brutally, or clearly (Hitler said of Rosenberg’s work:"Nobody understands that stuff"). However, Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg.

Yes, salaried American professors are promoting genocide, like in killing all the Jews, all the Native Americans, etc. And yes, this is happening in 2010, that final solutions are presented as wise scenarios, all over the New York Times, as they have never been so clearly presented before. Even the worst Nazis did not dare going official with what they truly intended.

Is there, in these calls to genocide in the most prestigious USA media, a hidden message designed to steer the emotional systems of masses towards final solutions? Should we think about Iran? After all, after contemplating genocide, does not simply committing to one more war come as relief?

Are these calls to genocide related to the ethical evolution, or shall I say devolution of the American presidency? Indeed, the American presidency seems to believe that torture is nothing that the USA engage in, and that assassination of citizens without judicial examination constitute civilization.

Promoting genocide gives a nice backdrop to these practical considerations. It’s the cherry on the cake. Promoting it from the New York Times, and considering this definitive break with tradition to its full perspective, would suggest that genocide is the Novo Ordo Saeculorum, the New Order of the Ages (as the Great Seal of the USA has it).

I stoop down to the sinking that these philosophical critters confuse with thinking to address their murderous squeaking. History has proven aplenty that not taking philosophical vermin seriously has terrible consequences. It’s not because viruses are small and stupid, that they are not dangerous.

Unsurprisingly, those psychopathic professors justify their genocidal posturing by the evil they deplore out there, as psychopaths are wont to do. It’s only understandable that devils would vaunt evil, even in the guise of denouncing it. (Thus the demonization of Hussein allowed to invade Iraq.)

I turn their entire logic on its head. First, by condemning the proposed genocides, as the proposed hate crimes they truly are. It’s not because there is evil out there, those flames necessary to warm up the baby’s bath, that baby and bath ought to be thrown out of the window.

Secondly, when looking at history one can notice the following. The main psychological engine of genocide has consisted precisely into distorting evil into various misrepresentations, some caricatural. American kindness to Nazism before World War Two was justified by decrying out some evils which did not exist (France’s "belligerence") while minimizing others (the Nazis’ racist fascism). The reason for misrepresenting evil is obvious. The preferred tactic is to exaggerate a danger, thus activating the fascist reflex among the tribe, allowing the fascist mode of government to rule.

Pure evil is less culprit than is generally supposed. Patriotism and nationalism’s excesses are not grounded in raw evil, but love. In other words, evil and love can turn into each other. Love as patriotism killed about 5% of humankind, just around the Second World War. (Fascism always puts on the mantle of patriotism.)

Although evil is big, and evil is bad, evil is ethologically meant to be as big and bad, as much of a big bad dad, as needs to be.

Hence Humanity, and humanism, understood in full, are far from being just all about love, and the most gentle sea breezes, warming just so the coconut grove lining the shore of hope we can believe in.

Humanity is the most conscious projection of power onto the world. Love without evil is about as relevant as existence without fields (matter, gravitational, electroweak, strong, etc.) Evil is what brings the imagination into the world. (Parents defending their children to death are a prime example.)

Imagine love and evil as two singularizations of the same action Quantum Wave. Love and evil are entangled, and it’s each others’ business to keep the other in check. Quantum random walk between the alternatives are moderated by conscience. Otherwise criminal madness sets in.

Singer and Mc Maham, as some (mis)interpretations of Buddhism, choose the Dark Side, pure evil. They cannot say it is good, so they say evil is bad, so bad that we have to do away with it, and to do away with it, we have to do away with humankind.

The struggles of conscience seem to them as the highest chore, to be avoided at all cost, even that of the reign of pure evil, and its ultimate achievement, total and complete annihilation, as in the Bible’s "apocalypse", and its Muslim translation, in the Qur’an.

Thus people such as Singer and Mc Mahan are fundamentally anti-thinkers. Most of Heidegger’s work is an example of anti-thinking, and Nazism itself, another. It’s typically the sort of thinking cows would express, if only they could write, a succession of turds on the landscape evoking a path to nowhere only dung beetles find allure in.

The rise to prominence of genocide is no accident. As the USA tries to bite more than its increasingly puny self can chew, increasing savage methods are being promoted (such as using huge lies to invade countries, violating the laws of war relative to occupation, torture, assassination instead of judicial examination). Of course Obama has turned into a perpetrator of these, instead of terminating them as one had every right to expect. Philosophy and history will judge this drift of the USA against the flow of civilization. But let’s start with Singer and Mc Mahan.

***

***

GENOCIDAL THINKING IS BACK IN FASHION:

The USA seems to be ethically imploding. The New York Times runs a series, on line, "The Stone", "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless". So here comes Peter Singer, honorable professor, as far as the American establishment is concerned, and recognized philosopher at Princeton.

Verily, Singer is just a parrot of a small part of Nietzsche‘s philosophy, but since Singer is much less intelligent than other, more famous parrots of Nietzsche, he misunderstood Nietzsche completely, and just as much, and in the exact same way, as Adolf Hitler, a famous politician who believed in "One Germany", did (although he was not born there).

Singer wrote “Should This Be the Last Generation?”, June 6, 2010. Indeed why to discriminate against minorities, by just applying genocide to minorities? That would be unfair. Singer proposes to annihilate all. A new moral imperative from the USA: destroying humankind. In its entirety. This is literally genocide, the killing of the genotype. This time, the entire human genome, as it were smallpox. Singer’s “thought experiment”, or rather, suggestive question invites us to compare ourselves to small pox. 

As Singer puts it: "very few ask whether coming into existence is a good thing for the child itself… we don’t usually think the fact that a child is likely to have a happy, healthy life is a reason for bringing the child into existence…If there were to be no future generations, there would be nothing for us to feel to guilty about. Is there anything wrong with this scenario?"

Yes, what is wrong is that Hitler is dead, and left no survivor, aside from Singer and his kind. Some of the ethically aware among us, may not feel guilty about slavery, or various holocausts, but we still regret them, although we did not perpetrate them. In Singer’s “scenario”, though, we are called to perpetrate genocide. No less. And then that idiot wonders "Is there anything wrong with this scenario"? Some people call Singer "lucid", because he is "mild mannered". So was Himmler.

Just as Hitler, or Himmler, Singer claims to be acting out of justified compassion. The first two were out to take care of the German people, and German speaking oppressed minorities, whose pain they were trying to reduce. The weasel weasels, but still devours prey.

Singer’s idea is to do to all men, what Hitler tried to do just to the Jews, the Gypsies, a few million Slavs, and various other groups he did not fancy. I guess Hitler was thinking small. To justify himself, Singer clings to the "19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer who held that even the best life possible for humans is one in which we strive for ends that, once achieved, bring only fleeting satisfaction. New desires then lead us on to further futile struggle and the cycle repeats itself. "

Ah, if Schopenhauer said so. I guessed he read Buddhism too much, and chased too many young skirts. Schopenhauer spent 20 years making court ordered payments to a woman he had beaten up because she talked too loud on his doorstep.

Schopenhauer knew better than engaging in vicious cycles. As he said with characteristic depth: "Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties… Marrying means, to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find out an eel out of an assembly of snakes." Thus, if Singer’s mentor identifies women to snakes, instead of more edible eels, it is only normal that one would not wish to give importance to the fruits of their entrails. So no more children, says Singer. With "philosophers" like that, who needs the most moronic Nazis? Well, apparently the USA needs Singer, tenured at Princeton, in the "Center for Human Values".

Apparently, for the New York Times, doing away with the human race is "both timely and timeless". Maybe we could start with the enemies of America. So many to kill, so little time.

Singer writes: "Should This be The Last Generation? But, If one wrote "Should This be The Last Generation Of Jews?" judicial authorities in several serious countries would react strongly to this violation of anti-hate crime laws. It is rather curious that the famous Singer suggests to do away with all blacks, all Jews, all Arabs, all Muslims, and all Australians (Singer’s homeland), and all children, and do it in the most prestigious media of the USA, while being revered in Princeton. Is Princeton a neo-Nazi university? And what about the laws protecting children against those who advertize that it would be a good idea to kill them? Because that is what Singer is saying, barely hidden by devious, weaselly verbiage.

***

KILL THEM ALL, THEY WILL SUFFER LESS: THE BIBLE AS PURE GENOCIDE, NO GOD NECESSARY!

Not content with proposing the holocaust of the entire human race, the New York Times found another mass murdering terminator, Jeff McMahan, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and a visiting research collaborator at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

In the “The Meat Eaters" Mr. Mc Mahan claims that "It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation.  There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if  predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species…  The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species.  I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.”

So Mc Mahan claims that species are not moral persons, and so have no moral rights. Interesting in a country, the USA, where the superior, so called "supreme", court, recently decided that corporations were moral persons, and had the right to give money for fascist or plutocratic political causes, lest their right of free speech were taken away from them.

This reminds me a bit of the Tea Party candidate with the "fully functional human brain mice”, but in a much more sinister way. Stupidity rules, and takes itself seriously. "Replace by new herbivores"? Why “new”? Apparently Mc Mahan never heard of the hundreds of people killed by elephants in India? Much more than by sharks, leopards, tigers…

Mr. Mc Mahan tries to flatter himself by posing as an "heretic", one who chooses. Implicitly: one who chooses to not follow the dictates of the Biblical God, as ordered by the catholic hierarchy at the beck and call of Roman emperor (self proclaimed as the "13th apostle", no less!).

However, in truth, Mc Mahan, far from being an innovator (as emperor Constantine and Saint Augustine were) is just a vulgar parrot. Indeed what Mc Mahan chooses to do is actually to quote the Bible, to justify his pathetic attempt at reason, when he is just at sea. Here professor Mc Mahan finding justification in the Bible: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and the little child shall lead them.  And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” (Isaiah 2: 4 and 11: 6-7)

Mc Mahan takes the Bible at face value: "Isaiah was, of course, looking to the future rather than indulging in whimsical fantasies of doing a better job of Creation, and we should do the same."

"We should do the same": Mc Mahan-Isaiah has spoken of the future. Why? Well, it’s in the Bible. Prophets can’t be wrong, otherwise they would not be called prophets, but they are called thus, so they are right (I just made an imitation of Mc Mahan’s and Singer’s exalted verbiage, which they confuse with ethical thinking). Mc Mahan then anticipates the objection that he is "playing God", by saying that there is no God.

I went into the details of this because it shows how Main Stream Thinking (Princeton professors) make genocide honorable, using, naturally enough, that genocidal book par excellence, the Bible. And this demonstrates what I long claimed; the interest of the Bible’s main mission is as an encouragement to genocide. "God" is just a backdrop, representing the emperor.

The basic argument of Singer and Mc Mahan is that avoiding pain ought to be the ultimate metaprinciple. To avoid pain, one ought to do anything, and genocide comes in handy. (hey, maybe Hitler got something right!) Humankind hurts, therefore humankind ought to die.

Either eliminate humans (Singer), or eliminate carnivores (Mc Mahan; carnivores include man in a fundamental way, as the rise of man was possible only through meat; by the way coyotes are omnivores classified as carnivores…). But, in any case, eliminate. Brandish a final genocidal solutions as what works best.

Those for-profit philosophers are contradicting themselves, though. If they thought that there is so much pain, they ought to swallow enough barbiturates, and put an end to their own suffering. And if their own suffering is not that great, why do they want to kill us all? Instead, by writing monstrosities in the New York Times, they make the rest of humankind anxious, knowing such monsters are teaching the youth in American universities, draped into the mantle of alleged "ethics". The ethics of elimination of what Obama calls "band that perverts religion", no doubt.

See how it all fits together, in the end. Obama has called for the physical elimination of American born citizens, without indictment, and, a fortiori, trial. Obama exhibited the same sort of cool detachment as the suspects above, Singer, and Mc Mahan: we have a problem, problem causes pain, so let’s exterminate problem.

This metaprinciple of extermination advocated by Singer, Mc Mahan, and unfortunately, or so it seems, and more worrisomely, by Obama himself, is nothing new. Extermination, and especially mass extermination has been the last resort of politicians, since ever, and it has been used, since ever. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. Roman emperor Justinian used it to massacre millions of Christians he viewed as heretics, thus causing a monster war with the Persian Sassanids, and making the bed of Islam, two generations later. That, in turn caused the destruction of the 2,000 year old Persian civilization, and the near total destruction of the even older Creto-Greco-Roman civilization, saved ultimately by those Germans known as the Franks.

The Nazis had their own philosopher of extermination, Dr. Alfred Rosenberg. Although he was never as clear as Singer and Mc Mahan, but actually completely obscure, Dr. Rosenberg was hanged at Nuremberg. That Hitler said "Nobody understand that stuff", speaking of Rosenberg’s work, did not save him.

***

PAIN CAME BEFORE CONSCIOUSNES, AND BECAUSE IT WAS GOOD:

Life on Earth is one system, and predation is how it avoids terminal imbalance: pare down the herbivores before they kill the last grass, algae, tree, or phytoplankton. Thus, destroying predation is destroying balance and then life, all of life.

And pain is irrelevant to that splendor that life is. Pain is life’s friend. Faced between average life with average pain, and death, all conscious animals, most of the time, prefer life, with the pain associated to it, to simple, merciful, death. Death is not what life does, what life strives for, it is what life rises above, what it contradicts.

Not always, of course: buffaloes cornered in water by lions have been seen committing suicide rather than waiting in water forever. In general, although conscious animals view life as a value, but they do not avoid their own death at all cost. To protect the young, or family, group, pride, pack, territory or leadership, they often commit for the "ultimate sacrifice".

Thus Schopenhauer’s contention that “one simple test of the claim that the pleasure in the world outweighs the pain…is to compare the feelings of an animal that is devouring another with those of the animal being devoured,” does not hold water. How did Schopenhauer compare devouring 10,000 times versus being devoured once? He should have interviewed a lion in the savannah, somewhere. Differently from Schopenhauer, I have exchanged view points, or at least glances and shouts, with wild, free lions, lucidly exerting their free will and caution.

Besides, so as not to destroy the predators predating, by uselessly violent struggles, prey animals are blessed with endorphins which are released profusely when they are put to death, so they do not suffer as much as Schopenhauer thought, the one time they get devoured. And certainly not as much as genocidal "philosophers" deserve to. Natural evil is not a monster, but more like an equilibrium. Stupid monstrosities such as Singer’s and Mc Mahan’s divagations, are a new type of synthetic evil, funded, just as Schopenhauer’s , on a total misrepresentation of nature.

Singer says, among other things, that rats are more aware than humans, because he is not aware of what a rat is, that a rat is made to be eaten, and that, for saying such absurdities, most human cultures would have put him, Singer, on the menu. Right away.

***

IT TAKES ONE BAD TO TERMINATE THE OTHER, & THE RAGE TO EXTERMINATE IS NOT ALWAYS WORSE

What else do we need predators for? First, what is a "predator"? (Besides being the name of a flying robot used by the USA to kill people they don’t like, plus whoever happens to be there, far from battlefield?)

"Predator" etymologically comes from plunderer, taking booty. But, when buffaloes, the most dangerous animal in (wild) Africa for humans, charge, it is not because the buffalo wants to acquire booty. Similarly, when France and Britain declared war to Hitler, they had decided to act as two lions when they decide to eliminate a hyena. Not for food. France and Britain did not intend to predate on Germany, just like lions don’t intent to eat hyenas. France and Britain were not out to acquire something material, but to eliminate Nazism, a spiritual movement they found intolerable.

France and Britain wanted to terminate the Nazis, just as buffaloes or elephants, when they charge lions want to terminate the lions. France and Britain acted on an important ethological drive: the RAGE TO EXTERMINATE. Nietzsche brought us the Will To Power, which I salute in passing, but the Rage To Exterminate is still something else.

The rage to exterminate is a great motivator, and it does not reduce to Nietzsche’s Will To Power. The rage to exterminate is what kept, historically speaking, the human-ruled planet in balance.

Buffaloes and elephants attack lions because lions are dangerous to them and their young. Lions and hyenas fight each other for the same reason, plus their competition about natural resources, namely prey. This is also found intra-specifically: lions fight lions to death to access territory and pride control (or even sex and food). Wolves do the same.

But that Will To Exterminate is even more prominent in people, to keep the earth in balance. Human beings are no simple predators, or carnivores. They are not just brainy Tyrannosaurus Rexes, or killer apes.

***

HUMAN BEINGS ARE ALSO STEWARDS OF THE EARTH, AND HAVE TO APPLY FEROCITY FOR PURELY ECOLOGICAL REASONS.

The Will To Exterminate is animating Singer, Mc Mahan… and made Obama forget the constitution he used to teach. They don’t know it, because the Will to Exterminate has not be recognized yet as fundamental drive. However, it is even more important than the Will To Power (that wolves, or elephant seals have), or the Will To Survive (that buffaloes and elephants have). Interestingly, chimpanzees seem to some of have it (they are obsessed with eradicating the chimpanzee group in the next valley over).

As the Will To Exterminate blossoms it brings in the darkest most violent neurological structures and hormones, and it tends to persevere ever more diabolically. Thus the Roman sentence "Perseverare Diabolicum" (it is diabolical to persevere… implied: in one’s error). The perseverance is hard to avoid, because once the neurological structures are built, they tend to persist.

And they tend to persist all the more, because eliminating the maximum of human beings is an absolute good for the planetary ecology. By the way, Singer says nothing less, or more, while thinking of himself as very creative, just because he does not know the past. So what he confuses for a deep reasoning is actually the deep ethological instinct of extermination Homo Erectus was completely animated with. People think Singer is a philosopher, but he is just a living fossil from a terrible past.

Perseverance and its tie-up with extermination, is not just philosophy in the clouds: NATO is persevering diabolically in Afghanistan, a decade late, if you count naively, or four decades later, if you count intelligently, precisely because the Will To Exterminate is so powerful. The more the adversary resists, the greater the perseverance, the greater the Will To Exterminate.

It’s not all negative. The Will To Exterminate, humankind’s ultimate weapon, can sometimes also be the weapon of progress, because humankind is all about progress. Progress in all ways. Spiritual, moral, technological, scientific, philosophical, poetical…

Not all humans are about progress, indeed. Some, devoured by the Will To Exterminate, express the ecological necessity of destroying other men as the ultimate value. Sometimes they do this in sneaky ways, say by just promoting stupidity beyond any reason (the adulators of Reagan, such as the desperate Obama, spring to mind).

In the worst cases, such as Nazism, one needs to exterminate the exterminators in turn. The Will To Exterminate can, and must, sometimes be applied to the exterminators themselves (now, of course, in Afghanistan, it is mostly NATO which is exterminating, and has long been exterminating, and the Afghans, defending; as I said, the USA attacked there in the 1970s, and even earlier, if one takes into account the ISI-CIA alchemy of violent interference).

We need terminators to eliminate fools, the Mickey-mouse world falsely installed in their tiny minds, and other dangerous fantasies they want us to drown into. This means that we need, within the most advanced intelligence, the most advanced capability and inclination to inflict pain on the elected target of our ire. Humanity is not about avoiding Evil, but about inflicting it appropriately, never forgetting that ultimate value, progress.

That the worst revolutions, and the worst excesses have made that discourse before, and they were wrong in their circumstances, does not mean that it is wrong always, or that it is not the basic discourse of human evolution. Because it is. In the human species, extermination has driven evolution. That does not mean that all and any extermination is good, but it means that it is always there as an instinct. Certainly nastier, and much more powerful than, say, the sexual instinct.

When France and Britain declared war to Hitler on September 3, 1939, the Will To Exterminate, the infliction of pain came to the rescue of the highest moral principles. "Blood, sweat, and tears" were further promised by Churchill, nearly a year later. In the name of a greater good. Even buffaloes understand this. Extermination and infliction of pain and violence can be the best next action to engage into.

But some Princeton professors do not understand this, because they have no interest in understanding this. Their fame comes from having a reputation for intelligence and scholarship, while not understanding what even buffaloes understand. So doing, they become living miracles: so dumb, and yet so smart about being dumb! So good, and yet, so evil at implementing their goodness.

(Singer is not always stupid; he was against G. W. Bush’s Iraq war). As I said, the same objection can be made against some Buddhist formulations, and against pacifism, when it reaches the rarefied heights of complete idiocy, where only the most stupid organisms represent life.

***

LOVE ENTANGLED WITH EVIL IS CALLED HUMANITY:

Economy means house-management. What about human-management? It is curious that we have no word for it, since it is the main obsession of philosophy, politics and, per force, civilization. Would its homonymy be the neologism homonomy? Is that humanity, in full, the entanglement of love, and evil, and conscience?

We saw above that tough, cruel, brutal, violent, inhuman decisions had to be taken to save humanity. Inhuman bombing and strafing by aircraft all over German cities was very effective to destroy Nazism. That was OK, because it was OK, said Satan, to kill children.

Bodies of school children in Braunschweig, Germany, after a bombing raid.

***

Berlin was 33% destroyed by aerial bombing. Cologne: 61% destroyed by aerial bombing. Dortmund: 54% Dresden 59%. Dusseldorf: 64%. Essen 50%. Frankfurt; 53%. Hamburg: 75% destroyed by aerial bombing. Munich: 42% destroyed by aerial bombing. All these cities had more than half a million people. Many of these cities got further destroyed by ground fighting.

Evil motivates us to do what needs to be done, and that love, alone, cannot compel us to do. Think Hiroshima plus Nagasaki: 400,000 killed (maybe), 3 millions saved (or much more).

So if evil, in the abstract, is a tolerable, even indispensable characteristic of our human ethology, if Evil, the inner part of our psychobiology that is mean and cruel, can be OK, what is not OK? Abstract evil allows us, gives us the emotional motivation, to cut through love, or indifference, when they preventing us to do something which, if not done, would ultimately kill love.

Without the help of Satan, of the Dark Side, it would have been impossible for the crews wasting Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or those doing aerial bombings all over Germany, to do their duty. It was not just the duty of the West, and democracy, but that of civilization. However, viewed from our heavenly side, it was so disgusting, that only a taste for evil allowed to do it.

Some of the brutes performing their evil deeds may call what drives their conscience "God". And that is why the God of the Bible and the Qur’an is so mean, cruel, jealous, and more than a bit demented in his drive to extermination (see the book of apocalypse in the Bible, and the end of the Qur’an). Otherwise the most arduous ethical tasks would never get done, and this explains that Christo-Islamism is by far the world’s greatest religion (by comparison there are only 500 million Buddhists).

***

CHURCHILL AS EVIL INCARNATED, FOR THE BEST:

Churchill’s activities in 1940 are revealing: no mountain was high enough, which he could not climb, but neither was any evil, that he would not muster to his help. Absent Churchill’s evil activities, the going would have been tougher (although a Nazi victory had become unlikely after the enormous losses Hitler’s armed forces sustained during the Battle Of France).

1) Churchill ordered the head of the Royal Air Force to send all his squadrons to France, keeping only the minimum needed for survival of England (his subordinate lied to him, and kept more than needed).

2) Churchill (and de Gaulle) ordered the unification of Great Britain and France (it failed by happenstance).

3) Churchill ordered the preparation of toxic gas and of the poisoning of wells throughout South East England (in contradiction with international treaties that even the Nazis respected).

4) Churchill ordered the destruction of the French fleet (lest it fell in Nazi hands, but also to encourage the others). British Admiral Somerville was asked to carry the orders, and did so, calling it: "…the biggest political blunder of modern times and will rouse the whole world against us…we all feel thoroughly ashamed…" Instead it showed the world that the British were even nastier than the Nazis (the nastiness was accidental, due to a miscommunication, as both French and British commands had agreed to send the fleet to the USA… but the point is that the nastiness looked good…).

What is not OK, is stupid evil. For example going into Afghanistan to support a corrupt fundamentalist theocracy (that of Karzai), while calling the opposition "a sorry band of men, which PERVERTS RELIGION, " is too dumb for easy analysis. The ways of the stupid are mysterious, and they take great umbrage when they are told they know nothing. But then, at some point, instead of tolerating stupidity, we have to crush the stupid so much that they can’t impose their stupidity anymore. So we have to be mean, at some point, with the insufficiently mentally endowed. We need a touch of evil. Thus it is a greater evil to not have a touch of evil. That is where we lose Buddhists, holier-than-thous, Obama, and those who appease at all cost. Obama needed a touch of evil to get a health care plan that made sense, or for opposing his generals, obsessed as they are, by conquering the next valley over, or for understanding that he banks were rolling him in flour, before putting him to fry.

***

WHAT IS THE ULTIMATE GOOD? CERTAINLY NOT PREFERING KILL TO WILL!

SUPERIOR INTELLIGENCE WHILE CREATING A LOT OF THE UNIVERSE AROUND US IS WHAT HUMANS DO, AND HAVE DONE, FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, EVOLVING INTO IT, AND THROUGH IT. This is the essence of humanity, and thus, it’s ultimate good. I THINK, THEREFORE I CAN (hopefully without messing things up too much). We if I don’t think enough, we can’t do enough.( Obama’s problem.)

How do humans create so much of the universe? By constructing first a putative universe in their brains, inspired by the observed universe. In other words they create first a model in their mind, naturally it’s a flawed model, something which is not, but a real little universe, made of quantum and neurological connections.

They may well use Quantum Logics and quantum Random Walk to do that, because Quantum processes can be in two places at once, making them a tempting mechanism to entangle what is happening and what might have been, or could well be. Quantum potentialities go hand in hand with free will.

The ultimate stupidity is the unconscious. However being conscious means one will experience pain. Let me explain. It is pretty clear that the simplest animals, such as Aplysia, a sea slug with 600 neurons, experience pain. Is that bad? No. Pain actually is good for Aplysia: it keeps it out of harm’s way, and that is why pain was invented, as Aplysia’s ancestors evolved. So, if pain is good for Aplysia, most of the time, why should not it be good for us, some of the time? But then what is left of philosophies which make pain avoidance their metaprinciple, and prefer kill to will?

***

NO PAIN, NO BRAIN: CONSCIOUSNESS WITHOUT PAIN IS ONLY RUIN OF THE BODY (AND THE SOUL).

Although it can suffer, it is not clear that Aplysia is conscious, whatever conscious means. "Conscious" probably means that it can invent stuff. Namely go from a neurology which is purely reactive and descriptive, to one where an imaginary universe embodies itself, the putative universe.

It is clear that Aplysia knows pain, and maybe pain is the only thing it knows, whatever "knowing" means. Thus pain is more fundamental than consciousness, and a fundamental part of knowledge. Of course Buddha did not know what Aplysia was, and, a fortiori, never engaged a dialogue with it, modulo mild electric discharges. But now we have talked that way to Aplysia, and Aplysia responded, and instructed us. There is more wisdom in gaining other animals’ wisdom, than in imposing ours, without having listened to them first.

Hence, when Princeton professors want to exterminate us according to their mission, or more exactly, their front, of simple minded goodness to eliminate the pain, as an overarching principle, they are, de facto, deploring consciousness first.

Conspiracy theorists will notice that Princeton and Rutgers are private, "Ivy League" universities. These elite universities attend to the plutocracy. The plutocracy prefers its victims to be unconscious; thus Singer and Mc Mahan theorize in accordance with their pay masters: by attacking pain, they attack consciousness, and thus the adversaries of plutocracy, and you can bet that they are not even conscious of that.

***

ATTACKING PAIN, PER SE, IS TO ATTACK CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF, AND THAT IS UNCONSCIONABLE. LITERALLY.

Ultimately life and consciousness are ultimate goods, the ultimate goods. Pain originated as a way to help life and consciousness, an unavoidable way to them, a protector and parent. Actually a lot of neurobiology may have risen from pain circuitry. But it still plays this role, even in the highest way. When pain comes from the catastrophic rise of CO2, it will be a way to warn against further catastrophe, a way more persuasive to most than intellectual reasoning. Hurting the beast brings up the soul, in those who did not have enough of it to start with.

In any case, viewing the elimination of pain as an ultimate good is, itself, one of the greatest evils, because it is promoting the annihilation of what makes consciousness possible.

***

ONE WORLD, ONE MIND; EVIL AS RAW ECOLOGY:

More prosaically we need predators, because predation is a great source of mind and poetry. We evolved with them, through them, in a mental exchange with them. Without predators to worry about, and admire, we are not fully us. A sea full of sharks, a bush, full of lions, concentrate the minds as only the proximity of putative death can. While relativizing and putting back in their tiny places inferior values.

The human species is not just omnivorous as pigs are omnivorous. Pigs love to kill (warthogs have been known to kill lions, with their razor sharp tusks propelled by their mean dispositions). But pigs did not evolve as killing machines. And only because they were killing machines. We did, though. We can’t live on tubers, acorns and mushrooms alone.

The human species evolved through epigenetic pressure towards making meat its source of energy, because meat is a superior source of energy (even the biggest whales use meat as energy; the tiniest meat, under the form of plankton, sure, but still meat). The earliest bones found with human made cut marks stand at 3.4 million years, a 2010 discovery. Those marks are apparently older than Homo Habilis, previously thought as the earliest tool maker. That would mean that meat eating was a solid pressure in human evolution, from way back, and that it mixed with tool, weapon, and knife usage.

Everything indicates that the difference between chimps and the human lineage is all about meat, and thus is at least 6 million years old.

Our energy guzzling brains evolved us, through millions of years, into the stewards of the land, and the lords of good and evil, each defining the other. Do away with evil, and you do away with goodness too.

Mc Mahan, the Rutgers-Princeton master thinker suggests to go kill all the sharks, all the sea turtles, sea serpents, and sea eagles. Kill all the cows, because they eat slugs and insects in their pernicious pseudo herbivorous ways. don’t forget to kill all the sea lions, and all the elephant seals, all the whales (much of plankton is made of small animals). Nazism, generalized, Hitler made coherent with himself: nothing like it, no doubt the present and more of the future of the USA.

We, the predators and carnivores will argue that doing away with stupidity is our first and proximal mission, and everything else is secondary. Such is the deepest nature of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. It is dishonest to claim that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is not a carnivorous predator. It’s our reality, we have to take it into account, if we want to keep on living. Just eating grass will not change this, and the ecological weight on the planet is commensurate with just eating meat (it’s less, but still commensurate, so either feeding mode is a problem of the same nature). Singer’s and Mc Mahan’s solution, to eliminate life itself, is no solution, not anymore that one would have solved Fermat conjecture by deciding to do no more mathematics. Singer and Mc Mahan have a problem, so they suggest to jump off the bridge collectively. It would be more moral to engage in nuclear world war, or , even more moral, to have the USA take over the world. And of course these milder solutions may be why the absurdly criminogenic propositions of Singer and Mc Mahan are given such a big soap box.

Since as predators and carnivores we are used to adversity, and we welcome their hatred, we will not be disheartened, because, to impose our superior morality, no evil will stand in the way, as the Nazis, should they still be around, could testify.

***

TOLERATING PLUTOCRACY STARTS BY GETTING USED TO HELL AS THE ONLY CONTEXT AND CONCEPT:

Even the Nazis never advocated publicly, no Nazi ever advocated publicly, the "final solution". But now American professors from the highest ivory towers indulge themselves that way, and the most prestigious media give them amplification. All indicates that that ethics is sinking ever more in the USA. When do we hit bottom? Torture, assassination, advocacy of genocide: why so much impudence against civilization? Well, because civilization is losing. Losing to plutocracy, that is.

The war in Afghanistan plays a devious role in this. The USA, NATO, the West are losing in Afghanistan. They are losing, and it was a deliberate plot. They don’t mind: it is becoming the plan, increasingly so.

Various agents, starting under Carter, consciously, decided to use Afghanistan as a trap for the USSR. What they did not say was that it was a trap also for the USA, the West, democracy. What is boosted? Fascism, and thus plutocracy.

Suppose that Al Qaeda, the godchild of the Pakistani ISI, got its hands on one of the 200 Pakistani thermonuclear bombs, and exploded in a major Western city, say New York. The reaction of the American establishment would be to impose instant fascism, the dream regime for plutocracy. So, logically, plutocracy, through its influence in Washington, should have used American taxpayer money to finance the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. And that is exactly what it did (last under G. W. Bush).

Creating a semantic context where extra-judicial governmental violence, torture, and assassination are tolerated and genocide accepted as a possible, even "ethical" solutions, are part of this general effort. They are both implied threat and distraction. The increasingly satanic ambiance benefits the plutocracy, this nebulous association of the richest and most powerful. Because it makes their activities expected, accepted, acceptable, it makes the flames and heavy clouds of hell, torture, assassination, genocide, into what the respected and supposedly respectable preaches. It’s hell, it’s now, and let nobody say in the future they did not know that it was going on. Because it is. Just look.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Why The Hyper Rich Hates The Poor

 

HATE IS WHAT HUMANS DO, WHEN NOTHING BETTER OFFERS ITSELF.

***

Abstract: The rage of the hyper rich against the poor is real. Even biological. It is pure, raw human ethology. As pure evil as evil can get. Turning people into carpets can be good, but, under normal circumstances, it should not be legal. And that is why the plutocracy is busy at work, destroying normalcy.

***

PLUTOCRATS CAN’T DISTINGUISH BETWEEN AUSCHWITZ AND TAXES:

Fund managers such as the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman pay tax rates on most of their income at a 15% rate. Simple mortals have to do with huge tax rates instead, closer to 50% (once the "payroll tax", social security tax, federal, states, if not city, are counted). The hyper rich have often their mansions in some locale which allows them to avoid more taxes. And so on. In other words, in the USA, anti-patriotic crimes of the hyper rich are now legal.

The obvious proposal, made for many years by myself, is to make the hyper rich pay normal tax rates, those that receptionists, secretaries and janitors pay (see below how it would be done). It has been known by civilized people, for 10,000 years, that the mathematical function called the exponential requires to tax wealth more, just for wealth inequality not to get so much out of hand that so much wealth gets in so few hands that the economy stops existing. Neolithic tax legislators discovered the exponential millennia before mathematicians did. Trust neo-fascist economists to forget it carefully. Maybe they should remove it from the mathematical programs at school.

Finally Obama vaguely uttered the suggestion of closing a technical interpretation of the tax code that allows hedge funds managers to cheat on their taxes (namely the ridiculously low tax rates for "carried interest").

Of course, Obama did not need to do that: he could have given an executive order to Geithner (oops, sorry, I forgot Geithner himself refused to pay for 40,000 dollars of taxes he owed, on the ground that three years had passed; he is now chief of the IRS, among other things; when thieves lead, crimes are legal).

In any case, Mr. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, a giant financial conglomerate, declared at a private board meeting of a "nonprofit" organization about Obama’s suggesting that he paid tax at the same rate as everybody else: "It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."

Four obvious remarks: 1) It’s like Schwarzman does not have a brain.

2) "Non Profits" are another trick of the hyper rich to exert power without paying taxes. It’s mostly, all too often, about fake charity, real power, and no taxes, while staying in 5 star hotels, worldwide. Another base plot of the plutocrats, and please be informed, as a hint of a proof, that the foundation law was passed at the same time as the income tax law during World War One (when the rates rose vertically from 2% to 77%!).

3) Supposing Schwarzman has a brain, he does not know history, and insults the memory of those who fell victim to it. That people with such influence can utter such dramatic obscenities is symptomatic of a sinking civilization.

4) For hyper rich Americans, paying less taxes than the people out there is a moral imperative. It’s deeply immoral to raise taxes on the hyper rich, just as it was immoral for Hitler to invade Poland (killing therein six million Poles).

[See more on financiers’ anger in notes.]

***

HOW PLUTO CAPTURES THE MINDS:

People who think more about their decisions have more brain cells in their frontal lobes, research just published in Science has discovered. People who are good at thinking about thinking (metathinking!) are PHYSIOLOGICALLY different.

In other words, different thinking, and different characters, lead to create humans who are so different, they are phenotypically different species.

The question naturally arise about the obverse. Can the political process create inferior species of humans? Obviously yes; if thinking about thinking is actively discouraged, as it is in the USA, one may end up with a society where people can’t think, because the crucial grey matter just is not there. A society where Obama is viewed as an intellectual or even a constitutional law professor (never mind that he orders the political assassination of citizens, those who nominated him can’t probably tell the difference between a frog’s croak and the constitution).

In the last 30 years, plutocracy has captured the political process, especially in the USA, making the minds themselves compatible with its rule. ( The process progressively gathered power in the last 500 years, as Francois I, Charles V, and the English monarchs got entangled with the hyper rich, to finance themselves; this led in the 18C to the invention of the privately managed fractional reserve system .)

In the present USA, one metaprinciple of correct behavior has become that, in good company, full bodied males will only talk about scores of sport teams. Enforced brain behavior has become very different from what it was when the demos was fully active in the polis, and therefore talking politics was the national sport (as it still is in some countries, such as France).

We have seen that before. This is a classical phenomenon. In the Sixth Century, in Constantinople, the mental life was all about the Blues, and the Greens, competing chariot teams. The involvement in these sports was so intense it led to massive riots, where thousands got killed. The emperor Justinian himself thought about abdicating when he mulled over the on-going riots .

That insane passion about watching sports, an obsession about nothing, was in replacement, and complete contrast with the passion for politics in Byzantium, a thousand years earlier. Why the psychological replacement? Because in a dictatorship those who have power dictate, and the people obey, but do not talk back. Hence the people are deprived of the power of dialogue, debate, dialectic, and, as far as the dictator or plutocracy is concerned, it is crucial that the prohibition of debate perdures, and talking back does not occur.

Mental activity is thus corralled into innocent pasture, talking about nothing. This mental and civilizational retardation tends to become an irreversible mental condition. Obsessive talking and worrying about team sports has thus been, for two millennia, a marker of the capture of minds by the mighty few.

It is no coincidence that Obama bounded with Gibbs by talking about sport. It is not just religion which is the opium of the people. Obsessive sport talking about teams displaces the natural obsession of the prehistoric group about whether it is scoring in its environment, especially against other human groups.

***

DEMOCRACY TRICKLING DOWN THE DRAIN, THANKS TO MASTER IDEAS:

More superficial than the master behaviors, are the master ideas. One master idea, that the hyper rich imposed on the people, was that the hyper rich would be taxed ever less. After all, the hyper rich provide with jobs and charity, plus the edifying spectacle of its splendid superiority.

Another master idea was that massive immigration, by bringing a lot of servants, would make the USA more powerful ("A rising tide lifts all boats").

That a massive influx of the uncouth from overseas would also have the added benefit of diluting democracy was not mentioned. But Rome also used that trick, democratic dilution. The USA gained about 30 million (yes thirty million) in ten years. Mostly through immigration. California went from 17 millions in 1976 to 38 millions in 2010. California also has an unemployment rate close to 13%, directly related to the immigration tsunami (“a rising tsunami washes off all boats”). When one goes around in California, away from a few superficial window dressing, one often gets the impression that it was all ultra modern… in 1950. And has not changed since.

The spirit of the state of law implicitly contains the notion of equality. By refusing to pay their fair share of taxes, the share that prevents them to get ever richer without doing any work, the hyper rich flouts the notion of equality.

The clout of the rich, scoffing at the state of law, happened in the later phase of the Roman empire, as the rich retreated to their estates, defended by their private armies, keeping the tax collectors away. This made the public sector of the empire collapse. In particular law, order, and the military.

Soon Roman politicians had to make deals, even military deals, with small, but well armed invaders, including the Huns! At some point six Senatorial families owned most of North Africa. The most amazing part is that this extraordinary state of affairs benefited already Seneca under Nero, but that nobody seems to have connected it to the incapacity of the empire to defend itself against Germans under Marcus Aurelius, less than a century later (although it’s well known Marcus could not finance the war, and had to sell palace cutlery to do so).

Under Reagan, the theory that the rich are sacred came to be known as "trickle down" economics. Under Clinton, a new twist was added, never seen in the history of civilization. The enormous money making power of the state, through private banks, already a scandal nobody looks at, was harnessed to feed the derivative world, a parallel universe where real money was funneled to create fake profits. by mastering reality itself through a derivative universe, the plutocracy morphed into something much more dangerous, capable of greater propaganda.

***

IF THINKING FALSELY DOES NOT WORK, MAYBE RAGE WILL:

Krugman observed that the propaganda justifying lower taxes for the rich has gone mainstream (NYT, September 19, 2010):

The rage of the rich has been building ever since Mr. Obama took office. At first, however, it was largely confined to Wall Street. Thus when New York magazine published an article titled “The Wail Of the 1%,” it was talking about financial wheeler-dealers whose firms had been bailed out with taxpayer funds, but were furious at suggestions that the price of these bailouts should include temporary limits on bonuses.

Some may find that rage curious. Obama has bent over backwards to please the hyper rich. Instead of changing the tax structure within the first week, as he had the votes to try to do, Obama did nothing.

Moreover, Obama made giant gifts of all kind, in the trillions, to transfer public money to private banks and other financial "institutions" (in a deliberately misleading contrivance, private company, if they are publicly traded, are called "public" in the USA, and private for profit companies are called "institutions", if they are big enough). The TARP inspector said in summer 2010 that the gifts to the private banks went over 3.7 trillion dollars. So why all the rage of the hyper rich against their pet? This is a psychological question, and Krugman does not answer it.

An obvious observation is that Obama has been weak, so weak that he has proven he can be pushed to the right, ever more, and with him the entire political system of the USA has been pushed to the right. One needs some passion to animate that quest of the neo-conservatives towards neo-fascism. Average Americans are timid mental creatures: they have been indoctrinated that way at school. The hyper rich, by getting all enraged, may hope to impress the commons so much, that they will intellectually collapse and reduce to spiritual crepe batter.

***

HUMANITY IS WHAT EVIL DOES, WHEN IT STARTS TO THINK HARD:

But the explanation goes further than that. The rage of the hyper rich has to do with the phenomenon known as Evil.

Speaking of evil, a stupid essay in the philosophical series "The Stone" of the New York Times, suggested to kill all the carnivores, using the weasel question: "Would the controlled extinction of carnivorous species be a good thing?", as a hook. The essay was a typical wishy-washy balanced act about nothing. Left unsaid was the fact that man is the planet’s top predator, a family of species that rose to supremacy through meat eating, so eliminating carnivores means killing humankind. That puts the guy who wrote the piece lower on the scale of theoretical ethics than Adolf Hitler himself.

Thus, indeed, in a preliminary step, the essay in the New York Times, implied: "Would the controlled extinction of Jews be a good thing?" The essay does not seem as sedate, from this perspective.

Verily, Evil is necessary, but it has to be controlled by Humanity, to optimize, Humanity. Evil is one thing Humanity does, and needs, but Humanity does not reduce to Evil. However, as its name indicates, plutocracy is pure Evil.

***

CALL IT PLUTOCRACY, NOT ARISTOCRACY:

I avoid the concept of “aristocracy”, because it is flattering –it means rule of the best- and generally inaccurate. Far from being the best, so called self described “aristocrats were often the worst. In general, the concept of “plutocracy” is much more appropriate to qualify what has been historically designed as “aristocracy”.

Alexander the Great, for example, was not the best. He was, rather, the worst. He was just a genocidal maniac, as he proved by annihilating in a holocaust the Greek City-State of Thebes, a democracy.

Alexander committed this crime against humankind, to terrify the Greeks. Alexander was just the son of his fascist father, at the head of a vast fascist, plutocratic association of gangsters who fought Athens after the death of Alexander, and won, with the active participation of the hyper rich in Athens.

The result was an eclipse of democracy that lasted 2,000 years, holding back human progress in all ways.

The European feudal aristocracy, which transmogrified from Roman imperial “aristocracy” (those with the best assassination teams) was also mostly an hereditary plutocracy, which was carefully wrapped around their version of “god”, their great fascist in the sky (entangling a fascist god and the commander in chief an idea created and developed by Roman emperors, centuries before Constantine).

***

TAX FEUDALISM TO DEATH, BEFORE IT DEVOURS ALL:

Why not to restrict long term capital gains 15% rate only to those making less than a million dollar yearly income? Did Obama think about that? And to replace the 15% rate, above that, by normal income tax? This way the hyper rich would get to pay the same rate, above one million dollar of income as, say, firemen.

One has to remember that the fractional reserve system has given private bankers what used to be the privilege of the state, creating money. Thus the hyper rich got from the state a powerful instrument no one else has. By the very moral system they advocate, that everything has a price, it is only normal that they would pay something for this extravagant privilege.

One can refine this proposal by distinguishing whether the hyper rich at hand profited or not from state help; for example, Mr. Musk, getting huge sums from NASA, for his private rocket company, is another example of subsidies which ought to be paid for. The case of Boeing or Airbus getting subsidies is still another question: there millions, if not billions, of people profit, and we are dealing with Colbertism, not favoritism.

Allowing a few big financiers to create the money everybody uses is as absurd as when private individuals were endowed, by the state, to raise taxes for the state ( a system which, in the end, precipitated bloody revolutions in Europe).

It seems that Obama has understood some of this, as he suggested the creation of a national infrastructure bank. Simply it should be 500 billion dollars to start with, not 50 billion (by comparison, the war activities of the USA cost one trillion dollars a year).

Another long time suggestion of mine is a tiny tax on financial transactions. Piling up financial transactions is not an absolute good, but an absolute distraction. I explained, in the past, that it would be analogous to the speed of light as universal speed limit, and, similarly, it would enforce causality.

Also such a tax would bring huge revenues, as many revenues grabbed away from the financial vultures. Oxfam has analyzed the details recently and found that a half of a thousandth tax (.05 %!) would bring at least 500 billion Euros/Dollars. This would be as much money grabbed away from the powerful "pervert band" that want to re-establish a full new feudalism. (In Oxfam, Ox is for Oxford, and fam, for famine; the hyper rich are indeed in the process of promoting famine, worldwide…)

***

WHY IS THE RICH SO ENRAGED?

Back to the question Krugman did not answer. In the USA, the hyper rich got what they wanted, and always more of it, in the last thirty years: ever less taxes, ever more distanciation between them and the middle class, satisfying their impression of superiority. Now Obama is doing his seduction dance to the left, like a toothless cobra, and the hyper rich only knows he will deliver six more years of bromide to be spit in the left’s face. So why so much rage?

Why so much rage? Well, first of all, because rage is all what is left for them to express which has not proven unambiguously wrong: the trickle down theory has clearly, not worked for the majority of Americans. Their real median income has been going down for thirty years.

Another thing is that Americans are brainwashed into behaving like sheep in primary school. Expressing rage is big no-no in the USA. Thus, by doing so, the hyper rich acquire the high ground: they terrify, they impress, and how could they be wrong if they are so enraged? It is a variation of the Big Lie technique, dear to Hitler: the hyper rich express an exaggerated emotion, to get their way, and hope that, by doing so, they will make average people believe that they really believe they are in their right. Hitler’s argument that little people expect only little lies, so are unprepared for big lies, can indeed be adapted: little people in the USA expect little emotion, so, when confronted with huge emotions, they are unprepared to resist them, especially when they come from their leaders (because the hyper rich lead in the USA: the political apparatus, especially the US Senate, is just a rather cheap, but most profitable, appendage).

Another reason for the rich to be genuinely enraged. The rich is enraged because the rich has got away with what they knew they ought not to have get away with. Then they learned to justify this unfairness by modifying their sense of fairness, and now they know nothing else. Dubious justification for past orgy has become virtuous expectation for ongoing repast.

By taking away their special absurdly low taxes, one does not just reduce their future riches and power, one also takes away their perceived rectitude. The rectitude they project, and the rectitude they perceive about themselves. Hyper rich Americans are ‘philanthropists" remember? they also say that about themselves. Not only that statement reduces their taxes, it augments their perception of themselves, it makes more of the world orbit around them. The hyper rich knows that plutocracy is good, they feel that plutocentrism is better. They should not just enjoy themselves, they should be celebrated.

The problem with Obama is that his best rhetoric, as found in this blog, cuts down on this sense of celebration. Under Obama, the rich becomes a problem. An abstract problem, but still a problem. The fact that Obama did not do anything about this problem has compounded the problem, because the rich feels irritated, not chastised. Obama has even humiliated them by suggesting that only him, Obama, "stands between them, and the pitchforks". They may want to prove they can take the pitchforks all by themselves.

Thus plutocracy feeds on itself not just mathematically, through the exponential function (the more riches, the easier it is to acquire more), but also psychologically, as it adapts its morality to viewing as moral, and normal, its past crimes, and the weakness with which it has been tolerated.

The behavior of the hyper rich, throughout history, is reminiscent of what happens when lions, or leopards, learn to feed on humans. In the beginning the predators are cautious, even afraid. Roman trainers gave their carnivores human meat to get them to appreciate it. But soon the ferocious beasts consider that human flesh is their due. That’s how man eaters are made; let them get away with it, and soon they know nothing else.

The obscene fund raising system of the USA makes things worse. And then the rich and their servants become petulant; see Obama making fun of his liberal critics at a $30,000 dollars "event at the home of Richard Richman" (!), for not applauding all the derivative loopholes the president prepared for his very rich friends he is so anxious to be accepted by.

***

WHY HYPER RICH SO FUN? EVIL. TO DO WHAT? EVIL.

Is there something more, in the behavior of the hyper rich? Why do they want ever more riches, ever more power in their hands, over the rest of humankind? This obscenity is completely obvious in the USA; the most useless of the hyper rich, the likes of Mr. Hedge Fund manager above, and the hyper wealthy bankers, got trillions for their operations, so they could give themselves hundreds of billions in bonuses, while Mr. Obama, misguided by the lamentable Lawrence Summers, spent only 50 billion dollars on the infrastructure stimulus, tat is, on jobs, over two years (calling it the "700 billion dollars stimulus"; for comparison, France spent as much on a special infrastructure stimulus, in 2009 alone!… And France has arguably already the world’s best infrastructure…)

The Romans used to say that Man Was A Wolf For Man. Unkind to wolves. In truth, paleontologically speaking, wolves had to fear hyenas, (cave) lions, all sorts of saber tooth predators, giant eagles, and man… Moreover, in the last few million years, the ferocious beasts first teaching to their children was to avoid man, at all and any cost.

But who predated on man? But who did man fear? Who maintained the numbers of human population within ecological sustainability? Well, man, could only fear man, and that is why man became frightening to man. And learned, genotypically, to love to exterminate man.

People such as Lawrence Summers exist, so that they can reduce the ecological footprint of other men, reducing them to misery, so that they consume less. In the past, such men would have outright eaten other people, as the fat kings of the Pacific used to. Human inherited psychobiology became the master of Evil, to save the earth, and thus, the species.

Thus, there is in man an instinct of destruction of other men. There is in man an instinct of destruction of man in the name of the world. This instinct goes all the way to self destruction (hence Hitler’s little adventure, teasing Britain and France in a war he was sure to lose).

This instinct of destruction is what animated the priestly class of the Aztecs (and it was pretty explicit, with the theory, and practice, of the "Flower Wars"). This is also why the Hebrew bible and the Arab Qur’an are so ferocious, or why Shiva creates and destroys, and why the Polynesians found each other so tasty, prepared as a luau. Not that the Polynesians had any choice; protein was rare, and saving the fish in the reef was more important than sparing the inhabitants of the valley next door.

When one cannot outright destroy others, one can at the very least oppress them, torture, them, humiliate them. Destruction has to start somewhere. That is why American plutocrats push for immigration of dozens of millions of aliens, while emigrating most American jobs to China: because it destroys the middle class.

The American plutocrats know just enough history to have determined that European plutocracy was brought down by European revolutions and rebellions by the middle class, a problem that will be prevented by destroying the middle class. First.

The hyper rich is driven by the instinct of destruction of humanity, an instinct way beyond the will to power. Ignore them, and that instinct, at your own risk.

***

Patrice Ayme

MORALITY AS PHYSICS

 

MORALITY AND HEAVENS ARE ANIMATED BY THE SAME LAWS.

Morality Is Revealed To Be An Application Of The Principle Of Least Action.

***

Main idea: Not only is biology is a type of Quantum nanotechnology. So is morality.

***

In an interesting albeit challenging essay, Peter Railton asks in the New York Times: "Moral Camouflage or Moral Monkeys? Is the great show we make of morality just a civilized cover for our selfish opportunism? [NYT electronic edition, July 18, 2010].

Railton, a salaried philosopher from an American university, makes an analogy with philosopher Bertrand Russel’s ironical verdict about the American university:“Remarkable. As near Oxford as monkeys can make.”

Having thus humbly confessed to an important insight, to keep in mind, professor Railton quotes Immanuel Kant on his amazement for morality: “Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe … the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”

Railton then points out that studies on primates and the influence of genes on behavior have brought a less heavenly aura on the moral law: "Today many who look at morality through a Darwinian lens can’t help but find a charming naïveté in Kant’s thought. “Yes, remarkable. As near morality as monkeys can make.”"

Science has basically already established that monkeys have evolved, and are made, from the same laws which give rise to the heavens. However, the laws of heavens are now known to be much more complicated than they were in Kant’s time. Laws of heavens include powerful and mysterious, all encompassing Quantum Mechanics, which sits prominently at the controls of the hearts of suns and the planets.

Indeed, does anything escape physics? What of the mind? I hold that: The laws of heavens, and the laws of morality, are, ultimately, of the same nature.

Why? For several reasons pertaining to what the Greek called "physis" (nature). Some of these reasons have to do with the deepest ideas in the foundations of physics, some with quantum physics, some with evolution theory (both biological evolution theory and spiritual evolution theory, both having to do with power).

The word and concept of "morality" comes from the "mores", in other words the traditional ways, the customs, the manners, those which perdure, in Latin. [Coined by philosopher Cicero, translating straight from the Greek; see note 1].

What is traditional is what has long worked, in other words, what is sustainable. Morality, by definition, is what survives, and thus what allows to survive. How did it work so long indeed? By managing power for the best. By surviving better than the alternatives. And survival means power, again. The virus that kills overpowered its host.

Now physics is all about energy. Modern physics as we know it, is a vast application of the Principle of Least Action [note 2]. Power is energy divided by time, in its physical definition. The laws of physics are the laws of biology, ultimately, thus making natural selection all about power, in a vast, but nevertheless, strict physical sense.

It was obvious all along that the laws of natural selection are all about power. The one being eaten transmit power to the eater (literally, in the form of stored energy known as fat, carbohydrates, i.e., fuel). The one being terminated surrenders its power to the terminator.

The same goes with ideas: ideas are not so much about beauty (as Paul Dirac had it). More precisely ideas are about power, and the beauty is in the power. The Dirac equation is beautiful, because, in a few symbols abstracting amazing spaces and concepts, it represents so much power (the behavior of electrons, the prediction of anti-matter).

Ideas are subject to natural selection, and so are all moral systems. The best survive, the worst get terminated, and it is this struggle which defines the meaning of "good", "better", "bad", and "worse".

Nazism was a set of ideas which got terminated after a mighty struggle of natural selection, because, well they were so weak, being so wrong. That struggle had been started by France and Britain, because they were offended by Nazi morality (or lack thereof, more exactly). France and Britain turned out to be super predators in the realm of ideas, who devoured Nazism, and reproduced mightily; all of Europe now being a vast republic along the lines of the revolution of 1789 and the principles of the Enlightenment.

Empathy and altruism allow the group to survive better, so they, too, find their root in power management.

Quantum Mechanics makes possible biological miracles such as photosynthesis and vision, using effects so subtle, they can be described, but not under-stood (nothing stands under). Quantum Mechanics is God-like, because it has many of the attributes of the legendary God: omnipresence, omnipotence, action at a distance, tunneling through matter, multiple reality, presence without existence etc. No wonder Quantum Mechanics can reach the moral law.

Morality, ultimately is a set of neurological structures which reproduce by concert and concertation. They are transmitted, as all ideas by speech, and example. At any given time, morality is a set of mental structures (abstracted digitally in books). Thus, morality is actually a physical phenomenon, just as real, but more complex and delicate, as the moon. Thus even more admirable. The moral law within is animated by the same laws as the starry heavens above.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Francophobia Ought To Be Un-American

 

WHY RABID FRANCOPHOBIA, ALTHOUGH UBIQUITOUS, IS AN UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITY.

We know the USA is not doing too well when francophobia is rising. Another chapter in the unfolding depression, most probably.

ANTI-FRENCH RACISM, THE GROSS EDITION:

I recently mentioned that Britain and France declared war to Hitler on September 3, 1939, and won on May 8, 1945. This attracted comments such as:

"Phukin phoney French fought phony war.

Much like the French soccer team.

Herein is my problem with you, Patrice. You just cannot reconcile the fact that France gets her ass kicked first by the Brits then the Krauts. Just as Hitler scapegoated the Jews for losing WW 1, with the "stab-in-the-back" propaganda, so have you come up with the lame/same type of apologia. Please do some growing up… Obama used to be a ray of hope, but now you disparage him mercilessly. It is sooo obvious that Obama’s Bus has left without you. Get over it. You have a much better life here than in France. You just have no phukin clue. I am sure you will say you prefer France, but no one will support you there, not even your own mother."

[June 23, 2010. The strange spelling is to avoid spam filters. More personal considerations were edited out. I do not disparage Obama, instead, constructively, I am debating him mercilessly.]

Just as banks do derivatives in another universe, the correspondent above is in a derivative universe too. In reality, France and Britain have been allies since 1815, even invading China and Russia together, as good allies do, and have enjoyed the "Entente Cordiale" for more than a century. It is this Entente that broke fascism, not the belated, ambiguous activities of the USA. It is obvious in World War One. And so it is in World War Two.

By the time the USA started to shoot at Hitler, Hitler had already lost the war in England (Battle of England), North Africa (Afrika Korps had failed to seize the Suez Canal and get Iraqi oil), Russia (Hitler’s army had suffered huge losses at Moscow and Stalingrad)… and over Germany (British bombing raids were destroying German cities, and the Nazis were incapable of stopping them!)

Far from being enemies, France and Britain were beyond friendship, beyond dying for each other. In 1940, Churchill, De Gaulle, the British parliament and the French PM decided the unification of France and Britain. Unfortunately a coup during the apocalyptic Battle of France, the most deadly battle of the Western front in the entire war, prevented its implementation, at the last minute. Informed French contemporaries all regret that the unification did not come to be then (nowadays, as many Americans do not know, and even Paul Krugman recently, French, German and Brits are all citizens of the same Union).

The unification of France and Britain would have allowed France not to cease fire, while giving the entire French population the protected status of (British) citizens. Otherwise, as the French government had been physically destroyed by the Nazis, the Nazis could have claimed that all French resisting them were terrorists, since they had no state to back them up, and kill them like pests (that was done to many French soldiers and officers during the Battle of France, because they had resisted too much; the same happened to a few US soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944). If all French had been British, killing the French like pests would have been a clear and definitive war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Even the New York Times allows its editorialists to feed racist hatred against the French. Roger Cohen wrote there an editorial claiming that "Just when you thought France could sink no further, it discovers improbable new depths to plumb thanks to … this imploding team where no middle ground binds the Muslim boys from the suburban projects and the clean-cut, middle-class French lad — Yoann Gourcuff of good Breton lineage?….It’s individualism rampant…It’s the distance between the tenacious French imaginary of the secular state integrating every immigrant and the facts of increasingly divided identity.

Removing Muslim veils won’t make France whole…Abidal is not alone in being a Muslim convert. Nicolas Anelka… also adopted Islam, as did Franck Ribéry on meeting his wife Wahiba (of North African descent). Romance in the projects happens with those who are there. France has become a land of Fatima Duponts without acknowledging it…something is working in America that’s dysfunctional in France. I know where I’d rather be an immigrant…Meanwhile, not wanting to look as rich as a French footballer, the president has cancelled the traditional Bastille Day garden party at the Elysée palace. It cost over $900,000 last year. Looks like a false economy to me. France should at least go down in style."

[The French team went on strike because Anelka, who Mr. Cohen condemns as a Muslim convert, was fired. Here is the paradox for American neo-conservatives. American neo-conservatives always celebrate the mediocre Ayn Rand for writing the "Fountainhead", a book where American millionaires go on strike, and the USA stop functioning. Now, of course, American millionaires never went on strike, and never will. But, in another French first, the entire world could admire the world's first strike by multi millionaires, the soccer stars of the French football team. You would have thought that American neo-conservatives would have been on their knees, making incantations to their idols. Instead, they found in that multi millionaire strike another reason to vilipend France, showing that France is just a safe way to express their otherwise undirected racial hatred.]

Mr. Cohen, a practicing Jew (according to his published editorials) apparently resent the fact that some French convert to Islam, and that France is turning into Fatima Duponts without acknowledging it.

I know one of these converts, a good friend. His wife, born in Morocco as a Muslim, has been a close friend of mine for decades. She is a very pretty, blue eyed PhD biologist, turned manager. Her husband converted to Islam, because Islam forbids Muslim women to get married to non Muslims, under the penalty of death (in theory). Death being inconvenient, and wanting to see their family in Morocco, without the threat of such an inconvenience, he converted. The French being deeply secular, they don’t mind wearing a label they don’t care about.

Indeed they are both secular in the best French tradition, and do nothing Islamist (differently from me, who drinks no alcohol whatsoever). These pseudo conversions are a general phenomenon, hundreds of thousands of French have done it. They just mean that family peace is the true religion of France. Speaking of integration, polls show that even those French who are practicing Muslims celebrate Christmas, etc.

According to Cohen, the French soccer/football team loss proved that France was a bad, divided, racist society, whereas the American victory proved the USA was great in all ways, a racially harmonious society. Cohen forgot to mention the Watts riots (deadly and with nothing equivalent in France in the last 100 years). Cohen forgot that, in the last 30 years or so, only two French passport holders were accused of Muslim terrorism. One was killed by French police, the other is in American prison (he was implicated in 9/11).

Just last week six American Muslims were condemned for pro-"Muslim" terrorism (to life). The total Muslim origin population in France is even bigger than the American one (something which seems to upset Cohen). So one can compare. Many American Muslims hate the USA to the point of mass murdering Americans. Nothing of the sort seems on the horizon in France. All the recent anger of French Muslim in France was about the defeat of the Algerian football team (made mostly of dual citizenship French star players), resulting in the immolation of 15 of their neighbors’ cars by excited teenagers. The French repression apparatus tends to give a Gallic shrug to this sort of excitement. Much worse happens in the USA, where guns are used liberally, killing more than 30,000 Americans a year, and the total population in prison is more than 30 times greater than in France.

Even Obama has amplified from the presidential pulpit the concept of "anti-Americanism". But, all too much "anti-Americanism" is just how condemning plutocratism is called. For example in the mind of the first correspondent above, I am clearly "anti-American" (I removed the abusive parts where he mentioned this, to avoid too much inflammation).

It is true that, for example, I condemn Henry Ford for the early and gigantic help he gave to Hitler. We may have enjoyed Herr Hitler, just because of Mr. Ford. Among other generosities, Ford put Hitler on a yearly $50,000 salary, a gigantic sum under the hyper-inflation of the 1920s. Hitler had a private army with which he tried to seize power in Germany in 1923, and, considering the exsanguinous state of the Weimar republic at the time, only Americans could have paid for it. And that was just the beginning of American plutocracy’s interference in the rise of Nazi Germany.

Ford wrote a book, the “International Jew”, that the Nazis printed and distributed for free, by 1923, in their luxurious headquarters in Munich (no doubt paid by American plutocrats). So I am anti-Ford. Does that make me "anti-American"?

The notion of "Anti-American" activity is a curious one. Hyper nationalism in the USA is not just the First Amendment, the right of free speech, but apparently an imposed duty. The US congress had, until 1975, HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee). Now it still has the United States Oath of Allegiance (officially referred to as the "Oath of Allegiance," 8 C.F.R. Part 337 (2008)). It is an oath that must be taken by all immigrants who wish to become United States citizens.

Part of the short current oath is as follows:

I hereby declare, on oath, that I … will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…so help me God.

This is curious, because it admits and expects, under oath, that the USA has “domestic enemies”. It also violates the separation of church and state since people are supposed to be helped by Dog. Not everybody ought to swear they believe in Dog. It contradicts pretty explicit text from the Founders, and is obviously anti-secularist. But never mind.

So why all the excitement against France? Well, France is the parallel republic, the progenitor, the historical source of the roots of American civilization… Wherever, whenever the USA does something, there is always the French alternative manner, now amplified by the entire European union, which has become a big France. The horror.

Of course the reciprocal is true, but, differently from the USA, this is well admitted in France, and, contemplating US alternatives there is not viewed as an Un-French, or anti-French Activity. The same is true all around Europe. Saying that such and such is much better in the USA than in Europe, is never viewed as a reason to terminate friendships in the EU, but so it is with the reciprocal in the USA. The smell of HUAC and the Oath of Allegiance is still in the air, like sulfur around a volcanic crater. No doubt why the USA has been going down the wrong road for 30 years.

Civilizations die when they are wrong, big time. The best way to not get wrong, big time, is to try to be right, honestly, and by answering others’ critiques, in depth.

By the way, truth be told, I have been driving Ford vehicles for more than 16 years… Intelligence rests on the ability to make distinctions. Henry Ford may have created Hitler, but his company can still make good cars, built by honest workers. And, truth be told, some more, not all of Henry Ford’s ideas were wrong. Some were excellent, like the one of paying his workers enough, so that they could buy his cars (an idea which eludes the genius of greed in Wall Street, version 2010). But very correct ideas here, does not mean no lethal ideas, there. Philosophically, it does not pay to be personal, it pays to target precise thoughts for destruction. (And others, for construction).

Intelligence, distinctions, prognostications: of these survival, and morality, are made. And what is deeply un-American is to behave as if it were not so.

Patrice Ayme

Evil Are Most Derivatives

 

EVIL MAY BE DERIVATIVE, BUT IT IS STILL EVIL.

Abstract: Germany, a republic, has seized the destiny of its currency in its hands, by outlawing some "derivatives" and "naked shorts on financial stocks" (when, unbelievably, financial pirates sell what they don’t own yet).

Meanwhile, finally, the Obama administration is pushing through a financial bill that has some teeth against so called "Shadow Banking", the vampire that hid in the night to suck the world dry.

The tyranny of "Shadow banking" and its associated derivatives has drained the developed world out of capital. Most capital was confiscated by an immense conspiracy hidden in plain sight behind notions so complicated that people fall asleep before understanding them, any time they try.

That is precisely why finance was made so complicated. Thus the prestidigitator makes elaborated moves and lenifying speech. But these prestidigitators of evil are part of the same establishment that makes war all over the world, as they invite us to bathe in oil. So let me present some simple aspects, again, of the greatest larceny that ever was. (As the Senate will now debate with Congress on the financial regulation bill, this is timely.)

***

***

The financial pirates and their media and academic helpers have been using the grossest propaganda to come to the rescue of financial piracy as an industry.

In particular, the popular right wing talk shows in the USA are making a relentless drive against the "progressive". Those are people so extreme that they view Franklin Roosevelt as a "dictator" (Glenn Beck said as he evoked with horror the financial reforms of Roosevelt, which brought unprecedented calm and prosperity until they were dismantled by Lawrence Summers). The rabid, but very popular right wing talk show hosts are amply helped by university professors, just as the Nazis were.

When the Nazis showed up, a mistake was made by people who thought progressively: they did not take the Nazis seriously. The technical point is this. Those right wing extremists think, like crocodiles think. Thinking does not make the croc right, but it makes it much more dangerous. The croc does not think very well, still, it is the duty of the intellectual to outwit it. Otherwise the intellectual will be killed, just like the innocent children were, by the Nazis.

As it is right now the direct "defense" budget of the USA is 708 billion dollars (without counting the budget of the secret "intelligence" agencies, including the CIA, which may well be above 30 billion). This is about half of the federal budget of the USA under G. W. Bush.

The same people who love financial piracy also love "defense" budgets getting ever more enormous. It is the same general idea of predation onto others, predation onto the world. To have a vague idea of the consequences, please visit the nice beaches in the Gulf of Mexico, and enjoy the oil. Otherwise, think of the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan (two wars arguably started decades ago by agents of the Western powers, agents of the shadowy type; this, by the way, goes well with "Shadow Banking", and this is no coincidence.)

A recall from history, 2070 years ago: so preoccupied were the plutocrats with smothering the Roman republic, that they let pirates gain control of the Mediterranean. Even on the sea closest to Rome, it was not safe. The young Caesar himself was captured, and held captive in Corsica, until a colossal ransom was paid by his family (as the pirates let him go, he promised to have them all crucified). At the time, pirates controlled entire regions, and possessed large fortified cities and their ports. Earlier Rome had controlled the entire Mediterranean sea. But no more. Pirates ruled.

Finally the republic had enough, and gave full powers to the very young and famous general, Pompeii. To everybody’s amazement, Pompeii destroyed all the pirates, throughout the Mediterranean, in three months. Three months. It had proven easy to destroy the pirates. What had been missing was trying to do so. We are facing a similar situation, with the financial pirates. They can be easily destroyed. All we have to fear is greed itself, among those who lead.

Recently the New York Times ran an editorial about "What Is Philosophy". The author, a paid philosopher, meekly proposed that philosophy consisted in "taking one’s time" (from something Socrates mumbled). Another philosophy professor commented more soberly that anybody who, like himself and the NYT author, was paid for philosophizing, was not the real thing.

I fully agree with the second professor, and would go further. We may also have the same opinion about economists. Economists hide behind jargon and mathematics, but the field is fundamentally philosophical: economy is about managing the house, not about assembling dissembling jargon, as salaried economists seem to enjoy doing.

Notice that, far from being professors, most significant philosophers were rebels. Those who were not rebels, such as Kant, a professor to the Prussian state, in Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad) taught what the state wanted them to teach: obedience. Eichmann, the notorious mass assassin of Jews, said that he applied Kant’s teaching strictly, and quoted him cogently during his trial in Jerusalem. Hegel and Heidegger are other examples of "philosophy" professors serving the state (the Nazi state in the second case, and many lost souls still believe Heidegger to be a genius).

The Obama administration, and others (Krugman, Johnson, Stiglitz, etc.) have said that they want to prevent a repeat of the crisis of 2008. But that is too meek a point: the whole developed world economy is crashing, and it has been crashing for a full decade; 2008 was just a bump during a much larger crash.

China and India are not crashing though, precisely because they have (giant) government banks, doing what banks have always been supposed to do: sheltering savings from savers, lending them to worthy projects in the real world. This activity develops the economy. The two largest banks in the world, by far, are Chinese, and no doubt the severest punishments are ready for their managers, should they misstep.

It is revealing that the "developed" world is called developed, as if it did not need to be developed any further, an implicit admission by plutocrats that, from now on, only their own fortunes shall develop significantly (so called "GDP" growth).

In the fractional reserve system (be it in China or the West, such is the system), banks are always government, privately managed. This is so true that the central bank of the USA, a creature of the banks, is also viewed as a government entity.

Why is the developed world economy crashing with its research, basic services, employment and, um, further development? Why are China and India developing by leaps and bounds? It is two sides of the same question. "Developed world" banks have been allowed to confiscate most of the capital, and trade it among themselves in an unreal market, the derivatives.

There are many types of derivatives. As their name indicates, they are all derivative to functions in the real world. To describe most of them as insurance or equity is inappropriate. Honest to goodness derivatives have existed for 5 centuries, in Japan, China, and Europe. They existed for about a century, in connection with the future prices of farm products, in the USA, in Chicago. In all these cases, they were appropriately provisioned contracts. They could, indeed, behave as insurance (a farmer could insure his real world production with futures going the other way, and since he was the expert, it would profit him, a bit as a casino can rig the bets to profit from them, just so).

Not so anymore today. The derivatives the world economy is crumbling below today have become a metastatic cancer devouring all capital, and more, pumping all the world potential energy, and more.

Thanks to Rubin and Summers, those plutocrats serving themselves and their kind, under the naive puppet in chief Clinton, derivatives were derived from anything whatever, in all and any ways. For example derivatives squared, derivatives of derivatives. A market of these derivatives was made, consisting in bets among banks and hedge funds about how things will go. This "market" became as large as twenty times the entire world economy. Hidden from view was the fact that this was all public financed (be it only from the zero interest rate policy).

The defense of derivatives by finance professors would be hysterically hilarious, if the leadership by financiers had not been so tragic already (from the wars they caused to the poverty they fabricate) . To say that "If derivatives are bad, then so too is the equity in any type of company, small or large, private or public, including those that produce real products and commodities…" is revealing: the author, a finance professor, thus admits implicitly that derivatives produce nothing real.

Question: can we afford to have most the world free capital producing nothing real? And, since the banks have the fiduciary duty, through the factional reserve banking system to leverage public money into the money most people use, how can we tolerate that most of our money is used for nothing real?

When 300 billion of house mortgages defaulted, up to 24,000 billion dollars of derivatives were potentially lost, in the USA alone (Europe has its own derivatives too).

Insurance without any funds to pay for it is pure theft. This was the case of Credit Default Swaps. The taxpayers were left with the bill. The plot between Goldman Sachs and AIG was nothing more than planned robbery, and the government, represented by Paulson, past chair of Goldman Sachs, seconded by Geithner (who was paid by the banks), played its role.

Derivatives such as naked shorts are little more than taking fire insurance on the neighbor’s house with the ability to set it on fire in all impunity.

Derivatives ought to be allowed only when safe, and effective, for the people and entities engaging in these contracts, and for the system at large, which is the entire world economy. The world cannot function when the derivative is twenty times bigger than the real thing. Those who do not understand that ought to take the most basic calculus class imaginable.

I understand, though, that the incredible leverage provided by derivatives has created an entire corruptocracy, from financiers to their valets teaching the wrong notions to the young and naive. They don’t need to know calculus: being dominated by greed is enough to them. Greed is not just good, it’s the only thing. Even calculus cannot stand in the way of greed, they think, and they bleat.

Loosely, but correctly, calculus says that the derivatives are always much smaller than what they derive from. But today’s corrupt financiers adulate derivatives that are twenty times bigger than what they derive from (calculation: yearly "GDP" of derivatives divided by worth of GDP of "developed" world).

It is always revealing to listen to the fanatics of derivatives, and shadow banking. When you inform them that banks should be forbidden to speculate (a principle espoused by Sarkozy, president of France, and Volcker, past Fed chair, and adviser to Obama), they do as if you were naïve. They always say:"Oh, if you outlaw this, and outlaw that, the banks, and hedge funds, will do it in the shadows, where the government will not be able to see anything, or do anything."

That is funny, because those contradictors, those plutophiles, assume that financiers can easily violate the law, that is apparently what they do best: they just have to go back to the shadows, and do their thing, and can get away with it. Question: what happened to the state of law?

Well, the time has come for the republic to grab a few of the biggest financial geniuses, and make believe "philanthropists", and send them to jail for a long time, for financial piracy. Examples are always instructive.

So what is evil? Well, the will to hurt others, just what derivatives have been doing. Evil is a derivative of survival, but that does not mean we should worship it, as if we were crocodiles, eating each other. How do we get out of it? Well, by being genuine, not derivative.

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: One finds above a hard mathematical idea: the derivative OUGHT to be less than the function it derives from. This principle OUGHT to be imposed both globally and locally (on the set of all derivatives, and on each derivative too). Not having it is tantamount to pathological mathematics (of the sort called counter examples in analysis: a highly fractal function can be smaller than its derivative, but such functions do not exist in the real world, except at the Quantum scale; imposing them boils down to imposing a macroscopic quantal world, where prediction is impossible, and catastrophe, the norm).

Economically that will force created money back into the real economy, where it could be used to prevent oil spills and make fusion-fission reactors, besides teaching the young.

In any case, my principle, that the derivative OUGHT to be less than the function it derives from, ought to guide regulators. Call it the Non Pathological Requirement.

Nationalism, Superstition, Greed: Violins Of Evil.

 

HEAPING SCORN ON NATIONALISM, SUPERSTITION AND GREED IS A MORAL ABSOLUTE.

***

Abstract: Nationalism reinforces aggression, and thus fascism, which profits greedy elites. Mishandling reason is a must in the utilitarian perspective of the few on top. Superstition helps in that endeavor.

The USA would survive better, as a superpower, if it integrated the notion that unjustified nationalism is a disservice to the nation, although most helpful to the exploitative oligarchy. Europe has understood this the hard way: hunting down nationalistic behavior has become a moral absolute there. Time for the USA to follow.

***

ISLES MUCH DESIRED:

A nationalistic issue is resurfacing in the South Atlantic. There are a number of islands and archipelagos there. Their history is a bit complicated, in the sense that it is not clear who saw what first. When the Europeans happened on them, the largest land mammal was a very special wolf, the warrah. There were no indigenes.

The Spanish name of the main archipelago, the Falklands, is Islas Malvinas. It is a translation of the French name, "Îles Malouines", thus named by Louis Antoine de Bougainville in 1764, after the first known settlers, mariners and fishermen from the port of Saint-Malo in France. Hence, just here, the islands ought to be French, and, therefore British, since, as the Queen of England, Isabelle de France, pointed out, circa 1320, she was France’s rightful sovereign.

For a while British and Spanish sovereignty was claimed. At the time, Argentina did not exist yet. Both Spain and Britain being now part of the European Union, it is one more reason for the natives of the Falklands to be European citizens.

When the United Nations was formed, in 1945, Argentina mysteriously claimed sovereignty on the Falklands. Great Britain coolly replied that it was a matter of the natives’ self determination. It is a general principle that, if a people wants to join the European Union, and the later agrees, it can.

Unsurprisingly, the Falklands natives opted to become European citizens rather than subjects to, what was, at the time, a banana republic dictatorship, albeit without any bananas. Moreover, it looks as if some in Argentina are made to eat bananas.

***

ARGENTINEAN NATIONALISTIC OBSESSION:

Some Argentines claim those enchanted isles are next to South America, their continent, a mere 480 kilometers away. By that token, Alaska belongs to Russia, the USA to Canada, and Korea and Japan, separated by a much smaller 128 kilometers, have serious ownership problems. Also Spain should claim all of Africa, which is in direct sight.

Some Argentines observed that the Falklands were sitting on the same continental plate as they do. This does not explain why Argentina when it invaded the Falklands/Malouines in 1981, also invaded other islands not sitting on that plate (South Georgia, South Sandwiches).

In particular the large island of South Georgia (170 kilometers long) is about 2,000 kilometers away, thus, by that Argentinean reasoning of sort, since Antarctica is much closer to Argentina than South Georgia, the frozen continent also belongs to Argentina, and should be invaded. Come to think of it, the Antarctica peninsula is a geological extension of the Andes, also implying that Colorado belongs to Argentina, as confirmed by its Spanish name, and its discovery by conquistadores.

After the Argentinean dictators invaded the Falklands in 1981, Britain reacted and defeated Argentina in a small but ferocious war. More than 900 soldiers died, 255 of them British.

Why did the Argentinean dictators invade? Mostly to distract their people from the oppression they were submitted to, and to re-direct their anger as a nationalist frenzy towards the big bad British. After its ignominious defeat, the dictatorship fell.

Now an oil rig is off the Falklands, as oil reaches $80 a barrel again. Operating one of these devices is expensive – about 200,000 euros a day.

***

ALL YOU NEED IS OIL:

According to some geological surveys the Falkland Islands may have the equivalent of 60 billion barrels of oil in total.

By comparison, the USA has 21 billion barrels of reserve, enough for only…8 years. As another perspective, Venezuela’s reserve are 87 billion barrels. Iraq oil reserves are officially 115 billion barrels (3 rd largest in the world), and maybe as much as 350 billion barrels (first in the world, according to the latest estimates, a number I always held true and going a long way to explain why there are several hundred thousands American warriors in the Middle East, including 250,000 US soldiers…)

[The exclusion zone is where Britain wants no Argentinean forces to show up again.]

Argentina said earlier this month that it strongly opposed energy exploration on "its" continental shelf (that extends all the way to Florida, remember, and please observe that "Florida" is another Spanish name).

"What they’re doing is illegitimate…it’s a violation of our sovereignty. We will do everything necessary to defend and preserve our rights," the Argentinean Foreign Minister opined. Venezuela’s Chavez addressed the queen of England, informing her that "imperialism was over". Since his oil reserves are four times that of the USA, and relatively increasing, Chavez is ever louder.

A resolute British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, an eye to his incoming elections in spring, said: "It is perfectly within our rights to be able to do this. I think the Argentineans actually understand that."

***

SUPRANATIONALISM: A WISDOM FOR THE AGE:

A good consequence of the European Union construction is that Europeans have annexed each other, making their empire much more considerable, without much pain or effort. No need to attack, as Argentina did. Europe looks forward annexing Siberia, someday. With smiles, and plenty of checks, and ideas.

This new method, of tolerance, understanding and inclusivity is irresistible. This has become the European way. But it is a re-acquaintance with the basic Roman method of integration: after the extreme violence of total war, the Romans were very inclusive, and tolerant (and introduced the notion, and realization, of universal citizenship, with full equal rights, a notion which escapes the USA to this day, since it officially discriminates against some categories of its citizens).

Maybe Europe should annex Argentina. It is not because of a continental shelf, or distance. It would solve neatly the problem of the Malouines (and not "Malvinas" please!). Saint Malo is in Bretagne (= Britannia = Britain… because the army from Britannia fled to Bretagne in the 6C, hence the name; before this flight, the Romans knew Bretagne as Armorica!)

After all, Argentina is a rebellious European colony, and, come to think of it, if Argentina is not going to recognize the self determination of Falkland islanders, why should Europe recognize the self determination of Argentines?

***

OUT WITH RESPECT FOR INFAMY:

Since God is dead, morality needs to be re-established on different principles, and an absolute basis. (Replacing the absolute God.)

Morality has been corrupted with "multiculturalism", a doctrine that says that, if they worship it, it is right. Whatever "it" is, and whoever "they" are. And absolute moral progress does not exist.

Indeed it can be argued that different cultures are different forms of mental achievements, and they all bring something. That way I am a fanatical multiculturalist too. But it is important to de-fang local cultures first, when global cultural progress has exposed their poison, if any. Because primitive cultures can be highly poisonous. After all, that’s how they survived.  

For example,  Maoris ate people, and other Polynesians were known to keep captives alive for days, as they devoured them piece by piece (salted and freeze dried meat technology having not being invented yet in these regions… although they had long been invented in other parts).

But there is no doubt that Maori culture brought something to the rest of the world (although Maori ways such as tattoos were found in the rest of Polynesia, the late and massive, well documented practice of cannibalism in New Zealand ought to provide the most advanced philosophers with an excellent counter example to many naive theories in multiculturalism and human nature!) 

Unexamined multiculturalism may make you not worth living. (In case the reader did not get it, this is a play on Socrates’ "The unexamined life is not worth living"). By the token of multiculturalism, the Nazis ought to have been revered for their deeply resented feelings. And the Aztecs would still exchange human limbs with a grateful president Chavez.

Multiculturalism’s modern prophets of evil were Herder and Rousseau.

***

NATIONALISM IS A VARIANT OF ABSOLUTE EVIL:

An example of intrinsic badness is nationalism. Nationalism is very bad, it is nearly always bad. Nationalism is discrimination on the basis of origins, gone official, and made into a religion.

There ought to be no excuse for nationalism, except as a defense (Iraq, Afghanistan). Aside from this, as a pure defense mechanism, it should never, ever, be tolerated. OK, when meeting an Afghan who does not know any better, and who has suffered a lot, by all means respect his nationalism and gently explain how, and why you beg to differ. But when nationalism happens between first world people, who ought to know better, it should be trashed.

Nationalism is not a violin making an harmonious sound. It is the screech of barbarity unchained. The "Na" in Nazi stood for Nationalism… This is no coincidence. Auschwitz is what nationalism and associated tribalism do, when they are fully allowed to express themselves. Nationalism and tribalism, and other discriminations posing as secular religions, always did such things, and always will.

Nationalism is a form of tribalism that poses as an emotional ultrafilter, an emotion that dominates all other emotions.

That ought not to be tolerated.

The Argentine president talks nationalism, because her economy is lousy, and her people need some distraction, so she treats them as crocodiles, throw them some meat, in the hope, that, indeed, they will revert to the saurian condition, characterized by immense stupidity, carnivorous greed, and easy herding in some swampy pen. Too bad, I like her otherwise. But she may have little choice, as many are the dogs of nationalism howling to the sky…

Kanzler Merkel with the President of Argentina, Christina Kirchner, before the EU-Latin America summit.
[Photo: Regierungonline/Bergmann]

***

WHY TO CONDEMN NATIONALISM WITH SUCH ELAN?

As I said, the evidence of the extreme mass lethality of nationalism and affiliated feelings was plain by 1700 CE.

Weirdly, though, nationalism became ever more popular during the next 245 years in Europe. Nationalism festered already in the philosophy of Herder in the eighteenth century. Far from being repelled by the horror nationalism and its ilk brought in the late Middle Ages, under provincial and religious forms, Herder extolled the beauty of tribalism, singing its praises as an end in itself, a teleology he deprived the concept of progress from. Herder was the anti-enlightenment philosopher par excellence.

What had happened prior to Herder? Centuries of mayhem all over Europe, animated by petty misunderstandings of the sort people learn with mothers’ milk.

The civil war between France and England started comically with a feast of the Franco-English aristocracy, a big family, where each side insisted to eat its own food (roasted versus boiled, etc.), and drink its own beverages (wine versus beer, etc.). And sit at different tables. In the following generations, this comic posing ended with the durable devastation of France, and acts of war for more than 5 centuries.

Nowadays, the seven French religious wars, the century long war between France, the Netherlands, and Spain, the 30 year war in Germany, the war between France and… Savoy have all been forgotten, and so are the tribalisms that animated them. Those wars, plus the Crusades, durably transformed Europe into a battlefield for half a millennium. All very good, according to Herder, but his student, Goethe, disagreed.

Goethe was a universalist, he loved the (French) revolution: all men are brothers, as Ludwig van put it.

Herder thought it was his sacred duty to hate French universalism, and kneel at the altar of tribal difference. Herder founded multiculturalism (aka cultural relativism).

Multiculturalism, in Herder’s time, led straight to terrible wars: the Pitts Prime Ministers of Great Britain took it onto themselves to rabidly oppose the (French) Revolution, and the revolutionary reaction was terrible, as France fought all of Europe’s Ancient Regime.

In the end, after the terrible dictatorship of that spiritual dwarf, Napoleon (a direct consequence of British meddling, as PM Lloyd George would point out a century later), France was defeated, many millions died all over Europe, Belgium was born…

But the French revolution won the war: the ideals of the revolution now rules the European Union (including increasingly Great Britain, in an ironical twist). And even the United Nations (although the UN self contradicts its charter of human Rights by some mumbling on multiculturalism).

In any case Herder, plus Rousseau’s hatred for civilization, led directly to Hitler (the Prussian educational system, using these worthies and their philosophical clique formed generations after generations of Germans according to these erroneous doctrines of violence, race, savagery celebrated as PURITY OF ESSENCE).

I am not claiming here that Herder and Rousseau were worthless in all ways. But they were worse than bad in some most important ways (and Goethe, Voltaire and Sade were vociferous in their opposition at the time).

Why is nationalism so intrinsically bad? Because nationalism is tribalism on steroids. And TRIBALISM MEANS THE MAINTENANCE OF GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL BALANCE BY THE MASSIVE KILLING OF OTHERS.

That art of balancing the ecology through war is already practiced in chimpanzees (as documented first by the very Christian Jane Goodall, good-all around).

With weapons of mass destruction, and an enormous human population with its own delicate technological ecology, tribalism reborn would mean humankind dead, and no rebirth. Far from bringing the spice of originality, TRIBALISM CAN ONLY BE NOW THE END ALL OF BE ALL.

The Argentinean howling towards the Falklands would be funny, if seeing human beings reduced to the lupine condition by their cult of the primitive was funny. But it is less funny than French and English lords from the same families arguing about the merits of beer versus wine in the twelfth century. And that did not end well.

***

NATIONALISM KILLS PEOPLE, SUPERSTITION KILLS REASON:

Another emotional ultrafilter, that ought to be viewed as always bad, is superstition. Whereas nationalism means the gathering of evil feelings and ideas to promote the mass extermination of other human beings, SUPERSTITION EXTERMINATES FIRST REALITY ITSELF.

Superstition is also known, by abuse of language, as "faith". Faith is an excellent behavior, the milk of hope. Superstition is what pigeons do. Superstition hides behind faith, like a murderer behind a grandmother’s smile.

After killing reason, or torturing it, or making seriously fun of it, unsurprisingly, anything goes. Then an elite can kill whoever they do not like. Emperor Justinian used Christianism that way, during four long decades, and Stalin used Marxism-Leninism that way.

That is why superstitious religions can be tolerated only when their superstitions make themselves very discrete (Rome was very tolerant with any superstitious religion, as long as practical bounds were not breached).

Superstition is a natural abuse of the metaprinciple of causation that intelligent animals discover early on in their mental development. As the famous American psychologist Skinner observed, pigeons kept associating in their minds facts which are truly unrelated if they had happened together first in their experience. "Some pigeons responded up to 10,000 times without reinforcement when they had originally been conditioned on an intermittent reinforcement basis."

Tell children that God wants this, that and the other thing, plus a few murders besides, if need be, and they will believe it all their lives. Advantage, if you are an oligarch; once your subjects believe this, they are ready to kill, and get killed, and you will stay on top, as the masses murder each other.

***

GREED, REAGAN’S ENGINE, LEADS WHERE HUMANKIND CANNOT GO:

Greed is called the "profit motive", in the present USA, and now, undeterred by the weak and scared Obama, the private health, military and banking industries of the USA are running away with greed, pushing around the naïve and overwhelmed young president.

Some health insurance jumped by 39% (now delayed by weeks, to Obama’s naïve satisfaction), and the number of American soldiers killed in Afghanistan tripled in the first year of Obama’s naivety, now having passed 1,000. The military budget of the USA, also augmented enormously, bigger than the rest of the world combined, has jumped up, in a country with 10% deficit. And bankers own the place, now that all taxpayer money, and more (borrowed from China), was sent to them to lose again.

Greed is another bad emotional ultrafilter, and it is related to nationalism and superstition. Greed basically asserts that having power on others is the emotion that matters most. In a sense greed stands above nationalism and superstition, because it is conducive to them both.

***

NATIONALISM, SUPERSTITION AND GREED ARE INSTRUMENTS OF RULING OLIGARCHIES:

When one has removed such bad emotional ultrafilters, as nationalism, superstition and greed, what are we left with?

Well, with those emotional ultrafilters resting and encouraging reason, and love, pure and simple.

Reason resting on animal and human nature, as they profit to individuals, and the masses. What is there not to like?

Why are such bad emotions, such as nationalism, superstition, and greed, fostered, instead, with such enthusiasm? Of course, ecological constraints can lead to the necessity of reducing considerably a human population, the hard way.

But sometimes the natural ecology is not to blame. What else is there? Well, the ecology of elites.

Oligarchies. Oligarchies are those mostly exploiting bad emotional ultrafilters. Why? Because they are bad, precisely, meaning bad emotions lead to mega death, thus activating the main defense mechanism in the collective psyche, in other words, fascism.

***

OLIGARCHIES LOVE ANYTHING CONDUCIVE TO STRIFE, HENCE FASCISM, AS LONG AS THEY STAY ON TOP:

Fascism is first an intellectual reflex, that of allowing a mass of individuals to operate as one: "E Pluribus Unum". Thus the mass of individuals is made by the fascist instinct into one super-organism, fighting as one: discipline is the strength of armies, because of this, precisely (and chimps on the war path behave very differently, as one silent well coordinated mega individual, and so do fighting baboon troops, fighting, or the threat thereof, being something that happens to baboon troops many times a day).

So oligarchies, be they the power elite in Argentina, or some religious-superstitious order, or the American financial military oligarchy have interest to activate those bad emotional complexes. Because that single mind at the top, it’s precisely them.

This could be viewed in the financial crisis of 2008: it was an economic and financial assault, and fascism, economic fascism, was activated. It was decided that the People would give all and support, as one man, its leader, and that leader was the same as the one that precipitated the crisis, namely the exact same group of corrupt financiers. The crisis augmented the economic fascism, because it reinforced the leader, as all crises do, if one is not careful.

This is why, as the disasters they provoked unfolded, Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin, and countless other demented leaders, got ever more support; disaster activates mental support for the one who leads the fight, whatever the fight is, and even if he started it. All independent thinking on the big stuff is shut down, and left to the leader. The mass just follows.

***

WHY THE USA IS MORE NATIONALISTIC, & EUROPE LESS SO NOW:

Bad emotional ultrafilters favor the exploitative leadership of the few, hence the great deference of the American power elite for bad emotional ultrafilters such as superstition (Christianity or Islam), greed or nationalism (remember Obama in the "State of the Union", telling us America invented the automobile, whereas the USA invented none of automobile technologies, at least in the first 150 years of the history of the automobile; but American oligarchs love this sort of national glorifications, to use them as emotional red herrings)…

The final enlightening step is to realize that greed, nationalism and superstition introduce themselves humbly always, in the small, and that is in the small that they shall be crushed most readily.

Here are concrete examples of nationalism light: When some Americans claim that the USA invented things they did not invent (the car, the plane, the transistor), that’s nationalism. When Americans claim that French cars are "crappy", that’s nationalism, or that France is basically a communist country, an American protectorate, where nothing gets done except wine, cheese, and welfare, that’s nationalism too. When Americans claim the USA is the land of the free (implying thus that other lands are not), that’s nationalism. When Europeans claim that all is bad in the USA, or that the USA is all about money, and private enterprise that’s also nationalism (but a mistake Americans themselves make: in some ways the USA is more public than the EU! Say about water…).

There are subtler forms of nationalism. Say, just from ignoring other people’s cultures, thus weakening one’s reflection on the very existence of one’s nationalism. An example of this is the USA’s discrimination against those of its own citizens not born there. No other country does that. It is a screaming example of natio-nalism: only those born there, in the USA, are fully human. Others, less so, with fewer rights. Thus establishing that principle that there are several types of human beings, even inside the nation.

Such screaming tribalism is rendered possible by being blind to American exceptionalism, through the ignorance of other countries. No other country has two kinds of citizens (but it is nothing new: think of the slaves). [After I wrote this, Roger Henry kindly observed out that this was not quite true, and he pointed at Germany. Although Germany had a multi track citizenship under Hitler, not so before, or since. The question of naturalization in Germany, although scandalous, was different, and has been addressed; for more details, see the comments. Muslim states DO have multi track citizenship, just like the USA.]

Being blind to one’s country’s major defects is a form of nationalism, unwittingly, or not.

The last infiltration of greed in USA society is charging ($300) for emergency calls: soon you will be asked for your credit card number if you want to live another day. Greed. Then, again, no other country does this, but for the USA (or, more exactly the great city of Tracy, California!). But a consequence of nationalism is that Americans do not know this.

One will have noticed that examples of nationalism gone mad abound in the USA. Am I exhibiting anti-American bias? Some will excitingly clamor that this is so. And they would be right, if I were wrong, but I am right. To deny the truth in national matters is also nationalism.

Some will say that this is my opinion. Yes, sure, but not just my opinion. My opinion is not coming naked and screaming. It is coming armored, intelligent, knowledgeable, and well escorted by facts.

The fact that the USA has a scandalous two-tracks citizenship, is hard, harsh, cold reality. The fact that the USA has the lousiest health care system in the developed world is also a fact, and the fact Americans mostly ignore this, and never miss an occasion to sing the praises of the USA health care system is a nationalistic fact. The fact the USA spends so with a "defense" system that girdles the world is undeniable too. In Europe, people would know what it means: nationalism out of control, foaming at the mouth. In the USA, American hyper militarism is nationalistically interpreted as American goodness, next to sainthood, as militarism used to experienced in Imperial Germany.

Europe learned that nationalism was conducive to the deadliest things around, the hard way. Whereas in the USA exhibiting strident nationalism is viewed as an indispensable part of the mien of a citizen in good standing, in countries such as France, nationalism is viewed as in poor taste. This, to look down on nationalism, the Europeans, and, in particular the Germans, have learned the hard way. Things have really gone a long way, because the Germans and the French used to be extremely nationalistic a few generations ago, much more than the citizens of the USA used to be.

After 1945, top intellectuals in Europe understood that nationalism ought to be abated. That ought to be a primary mission. A change people ought to believe in. And abated it was. It was even mutilated. a point was made that European superpowers ought to have no more rights than others (starting, of course, with Germany and its insufferable past tendencies). Malta (population: 400,000) and Slovenia (population, 2 millions) have, on paper, the same rights as France (population close to 70 millions). By 1945, Europe had learned something important: nationalism pays back, big time. But only in blood, sweat, and tears.

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ENOUGH EVIL AROUND ALREADY!

Nietzsche famously pointed out that: "Verily, there is a future, even for evil." Well, there is plenty enough of a future for evil. New technologies open new avenues to evil all the time. So we have to be busy closing those we have identified, already. Nationalism is one of those.

The savage wars that wrecked Europe for seven centuries (1250 to 1945… after many centuries of quasi peace…) have been a lesson for Europeans in the dangers of nationalism. Nearly all nations on earth existing today are of recent vintage (even China ought to be viewed as recent, just as the Kaiser’s Germany in 1914 was only 44 years old, China is about 60 years old in its present philosophical nature). Fresh nations have learned nothing much yet.

It is hilarious to see the Americans furiously reproaching the Chinese the under-evaluation of, well, the Sino-American currency: talk about blind nationalism.

The fundamental reason for nationalism is the same fundamental reason for evil: too many people do not a world make. So, shall we rise above fatality and the weight of natural evolution? And impose man above fate?

As Voltaire said:"One must crush infamy"… And one should not miss a single occasion to do so. There is not just morality in crushing infamy, but the prospect of sheer survival for all concerned. Blind and unexamined nationalism is the most dangerous infamy. Let’s crush it, it’s good exercise.

PA

P/S 1: The notion of ultrafilter comes from topology, and has a precise meaning there, as a maximal element for inclusion. It basically corresponds to (being perceived as) ultimate concept.

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P/S 2: I said nationalism was justified if and only if ("iff") a defense mechanism. Critiques will point out that offenders always claim to be defending themselves under some sort of perceived aggression. The wolf had to kill the sheep becomes the latter’s brother polluted the canine’s water last year.

For example, NATO claims to be defending itself during its occupation of Afghanistan, already much longer than WWII, and still killing completely innocent civilians there with wild abandon. Indeed, one has to be careful with the concept of defense. NATO is clearly under attack from hard core Islamism (just as the West used to be under attack under the extremely similar hard core Christianism) , but NATO is not under attack by Afghanistan… And never was. (Bin Laden and friends were put in Afghanistan by the USA, and equipped with fancy weapons.) Thus, differently from the WWII started by Franco-Britannia on September 3, 1939, it is not clear that the Afghan war is a just war. It will be just, only if well done. Which is not presently the case.

As far as the Afghans are concerned, though, their war against NATO is a just war of national defense. Thus, the real enemy of NATO is not just that reality, but also that perception.

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P/S 3: The Chinese have pegged their currency to the US dollar. So, as the USA proceeded to lower its currency to gain unfair economic advantage (although the USA has 25% of the world’s industrial production, 2010). The Chinese peg meant that the Chinese currency went down with the American dollar, ruining the little American plot for gaining…unfair advantage. This is now over, as the European Union had enough, and found a way to ruin that unfair little plot. These could become tragic games, if people stopped seeing the humor hidden in them…

Transmissibility and lethality.

GENTLENESS MAKES FOR CONTAGION, FACILITATING HOLOCAUSTS.

In a nutshell: There is, in epidemiology, a complementarity principle between transmissibility and lethality. It explains the change of lethality of the Black Plague and the present flu epidemics. One can extend this observation of complementarity to systems of thought, and deduce from it the necessity of vaccinating against some religions and some forms of corruption.

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COMPLEMENTARITY PRINCIPLE IN EPIDEMIOLOGY:

In 1348 CE, the "Black Plague" swept Europe, killing between 40% and 60% of the population. It was long considered to be the bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. But there are many problems with this interpretation, and the known facts fit better some sort of viral hemorrhagic fever.

Some diseases are known in Africa, such as Ebola, an hemorrhagic virus, which are hard to transmit: infected people show symptoms before they can infect the next potential victims. Whereas, after infection, the Black Plague killed in 4 to 8 days, and was highly contagious during its silent phase (mysteriously it showed up under 3 different forms).

In general, there is a balance between transmissibility and lethality: an agent that is highly lethal will be hard to transmit, so little prone to a pandemic.

Conversely, the new "Porcine" flu, A H1N1, has been extremely contagious, and not very dangerous… So far. (Although, because of the nature of the surface of the virus, it attacks deeper in the lungs than the usual flu.)

Such an infectious agent as AH1N1, which is easy to get, and not too dangerous, can afford to become much more deadly. More exactly, if a more deadly mutation occurs to such an agent, there is a high probability that the agent will stay as contagious, or nearly as contagious as before (contagion depending most probably upon dozens of other genetic surface characteristics of the agent). That was the clear danger with AH1N1, and with any agent that is rather innocuous, and highly contagious, while not far removed from very deadly forms.

The extremely deadly pandemics of Hong Kong flu in the 1950s and the so called Spanish flu of 1918 (which killed 40 millions) were apparently H1N1 (with supplementary mutations, relative to the present form). Unfortunately, the health authorities did not explain this clearly. Such a mutation, D222G, has appeared, and it killed at least one otherwise perfectly healthy 26 year old French male, in a few hours.

So let’s say to make the reasoning computable, that the Black Plague killed 50% of Europe, and that 50% of the survivors caught the disease. Those survivors were immunized (whatever the disease was). The remaining 25% had never come into contact with the disease (to prevent contagion, travel was forbidden, and many cities and villages had no cases of the "Black Plague"). Hence, in the future, the density of the population that the infectious agent could spread into was just a fourth of what it was previously. Hence, one can suppose the agent could propagate if, and only, if each human carrier could survive four times longer. By then, there was a much higher probability that the immune system of the carrier had kicked in gear, and the human carrier would survive.

Hence the Black Plague agent could survive if and only if it mutated into a form that was more than four times less lethal (using simplistic math). And this is what was observed. Thus a milder form of the Plague affected Europe for centuries, with waves of epidemics, but never again as viciously as the one of 1348. As the centuries passed, and population rebounded, the infectious agent could become more lethal again (hence the more ferocious plague that made the young Newton flee to the family farm, around 1660, to contemplate falling apples, while watching the moon in the distance).

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COMPLEMENTARITY PRINCIPLE IN MORAL SYSTEMS:

So much for biology. An interest of new science is that it provides new models that can be used far from their original realm (Einstein, by the way, was an expert at doing this within physics, and that means that many concepts that he considered fully demonstrated were not so, they were just analogies; but analogies are main tools of philosophy). This is actually one of the main ways of creating new philosophy: by grabbing scientific models, and applying them elsewhere.

So is there a moral philosophy to be extracted from this biological phenomenon of complementarity, as above? Well, there is. If a system of thought is highly contagious, and seems rather innocuous while related to extremely deadly forms, it could also mutate in a very deadly way, while staying highly contagious.

This is what happened with Nazism. There had been, for centuries, deadly, but not that deadly "anti-Semitism" (mostly meaning anti-Judaism), in Europe, and especially Germany. The old deadly Christian anti-Judaism had been rekindled by Luther. It looked innocuous enough to those who were not intellectually rigorous, so it was highly contagious (in other words, German intellectuals and artists did not fight it as much as they should have). people would say Christianism was about love, so if the impotent Luther raged about Jews, it got to be right somehow, but it did not matter, because Luther had no divisions. Well, Hitler had hundreds of divisions, and the poison reinforced by Luther was in all the mind, including that of Hitler (who, it is true also admired Islam, another religion which hates the Jews, to an amazingly grotesque extent).

Then this latent German racism mutated in Africa: in Namibia, Goering, father of Goering, governor of Namibia, organized a holocaust of the "racially inferior natives" (if the Jews were inferior, why not the African bushmen?). So global racism came out as a strong deadly, but localized, racial theory, and most Germans came to accept it (because the virus of conformism to peer pressure and discipline had long been spread by the Prussian army, and the schools subservient to it). Racism was then applied to the French and their African troops, and the long despised and hated "Slaves" ("Slavs") to the East. This global racism became white hot as the German empire lost World War One. From rage (a further mutation).

Of course Muslim fundamentalism is a case in point too: on the surface it’s innocuous, and thus highly contagious. Even Obama promoted it in Cairo (as all presidents of the USA have done since Roosevelt in 1945). Supposedly that is one of the reason why he received the Nobel Prize. Why would one want to vaccinate against Muslim fundamentalism? Simply because it is closely related to extremely lethal religions.

Indeed Islam was obtained by a succession of mutations from Judaism and Christianism. Judaism and Christianism have killed millions. Indeed fanatical Judaism brought the destruction of a semi independent Judea under Rome, causing a war that killed a million around 70 CE, and was both a civil war among Jews, plus a war against Rome. Christianism, a religion imposed by the fascist, particularly bloody and homicidal emperor Constantine, is, of course, probably the most lethal religion that ever was. It even single handedly caused the Dark Ages, by burning all libraries, making a self described "war against the philosophers", killing intellectuals, all heretics (purified by fire, as Christ recommended), killing many Jews, closing schools, forcing all free thinkers out of the empire, etc…

So one wants to vaccinate against highly infectious agents that look innocuous enough. Unregulated Wall Street is a recent example. For nearly a century, the exactions of Wall Street (behind Hitler) and U.S. Big Oil (also behind Hitler; for example, Texaco is how Hitler’s Franco puppet conquered Spain) profited the general American population, and thus were viewed with benign neglect. Wall Street was deadly to Europeans, profitable to Americans (for example, Wall Street created IG Farben, which created Zyklon B, the gas that killed millions of European civilians, from racial hatred). But Europe has survived, become somewhat immune to Wall Street, and now Wall Street is reduced to blatant maneuvering, front and center (instead of hiding behind Hitler and Stalin; yes, some Wall Street titans got decorated by both devils).

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Thus what is gentle enough to be highly contagious, if related to deadly form, should be vaccinated against when there is still time. History and biology concur.

PA

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