Real Danger: Natural Runaway Warming Triggered By Man-Made Warming

When one looks at climate change, one should not look back, and whine that there was always change, as silly deniers do. One should look forward, ponder how bad it’s going to get, all too soon, and see the necessity for a carbon tax (or, more exactly, set-up worldwide carbon cost compensation).

Yes, so far we have only seen directly-man-induced global warming: the CO2 percentage went from 280 parts per million until 410 ppm (In truth, 490 ppm, as I have long explained, and will, again, below). In any case, 280 ppm up to 410 ppm, that’s an increase of 130 ppm. 130/280 = 46%. if one supposes that the obstruction CO2 presents to infrared light is proportional to its presence, then the “forcing” of the greenhouse effect should have been augmented by 46%. 

Moreover, indeed, one has to add to this man-made gases which have a greenhouse effect up to 100,000 times greater than CO2. That means they capability to block infrared radiation, and so to confine heat in the lower atmosphere instead of letting it escape to the cosmos is 10,000 times greater than CO2. 

Talking only CO2, while forgetting CH4 and NO2, is unscientific. Not to say stupid and criminal. Criminal in the sense of ultimate mass destruction.

https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

Those greenhouse contributions of NON-CO2 manmade greenhouse gases amount to 25% of the total anthropomorphic contribution. So the real CO2 equivalent ppm is 490 ppm, not 410 ppm. An augmentation of more than 61% since 1789 CE. (And even that is an underestimate: because it overestimates the NO2 contribution in 1789 CE, say. In 1789 CE, there already was man-made methane, CH4, in the air, from massive pastoralism in the last 7000 years (some think that prevented a glaciation!). However, in 1789 CE, there was no NO2 whatsoever: NO2 is created only at high temperature, say by a diesel engine, when gases get hot enough to burn nitrogen in the combustion chamber!).

This is not a music the blissfully ignorant commons want to listen to. But they should:

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-earth-global-temperature.html

To put all of this in perspective, the genus Homo has not evolved under such circumstances. Antarctica ice cores, 800,000 years old, show a density of CO2 of only 185 ppm.

In any case, 490 ppm, guaranteed to be 500 ppm in CO2 equivalent is well above the point at which Antarctica loses, or gains, its beech forests. 500 ppm is well above the Antarctica equilibrium point. The melting of the West Antarctica ice shield is thus guaranteed. The serious scientific question is now whether West Antarctica will melt within decades, as I believe, or centuries. That incoming disaster was long obvious. Only at the Paris Climate Conference, the IPCC, the United Nations Panel in charge of studying climate change admitted that I was right, and they were wrong, the temperature rise should be limited to ONLY 1.5 Centigrade, not to two degrees Centigrades:

Unfortunately last year, in 2016, the rise was 1.2 C, that is 80% of the way up to 1.5C… 2017, so far, runs close behind.

Exponential rise now in evidence (at last)? Look at the last few years…

(It used to be that scientists well-financed by those who loved fossil fuels, and their admirers in academic management, including university boards, and fuel plutos addicted governments pretended that the stability of West Antarctica was guaranteed for 5,000 years. Serious scientific papers full of gravitas, ladies and gentlemen, used to pontificate that no ocean would seriously rise for 5,000 years. Just like that. After all, why not say whatever, like Valley Girls, since it kept them greedsters rich and esteemed by the best with power (aristo-crats)? Scientists used to believe in the stability of the Holy Trinity, after all…)

It is strongly scientifically suspected that the last time Earth had comparable levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that we have today was at least three million years ago, during the mid-Pliocene (then of course there was no CH4 in level in level comparable to what we see today, as cattle was less abundant, thanks to all too many lions, and no NO2 whatsoever).

Back then, global average temperature was about 3.6–5.2°F (2–3°Centigrade) warmer than it is today. Ocean level was much higher, by about 15–25 meters. So this heat and this sea level rise are now unavoidable. Already.

Back then there were camels in the high Arctic, as far north as one can go without swimming: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/camels-in-the-highest-arctic-again-soon/

The global density of carbon dioxide increased rapidly in the past couple of years, thanks in part to a strong El Niño which, lasted around two years (that unusual situation is a consequence of the strong planetary warming). El Niño patterns generally shift the location of tropical rains, often leaving tropical forests dry, thus more susceptible to fires — fires that, in turn, release a lot of stored carbon into the atmosphere. But direct human activities — like the burning of fossil fuels for transportation or electricity, or the conversion of forests and grasslands into developed areas or farmland — have also contributed to the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide at a rate never seen before.

Thus we see the real problem: manmade warming, from all these gases triggers supplementary effects which, by themselves, augment the warming. For example, the more ice and snow melts in the polar and mountainous areas, the more those areas absorb sunlight into the ground, augmenting the melting and warming, year around.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/2-c-is-too-much/

Man-made warming, which has been just a bit more than linear, is in danger of waking up strong exponential warming driven by natural phenomena which human activity would have triggered.

Once those strong natural exponential have been triggered, the warming will be runaway, and out of human hands. The analogy is being in a very dry forest full of deliciously smelling plants waving happily in a very hot wind. If one light a match, it will contribute to the warming, but not that much. Drop the light on the ground, watch the bushes catches fire: at this point natural warming is launched. Soon the fire gets to the crowns of the trees, an unstoppable inferno arises.

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-earth-global-temperature.html

Some deniers anxious to win their daily bread, will insinuate that I am claiming that Earth will turn into Venus, without proof. No, not quite. What I am saying is subtle, and it’s experimentally backed-up by what happened in the past.

First of all, we have seen it all before, indeed, during the Permian-Trias mass extinction, 252 million years ago (more on that some other day, when, like today, I am travelling, and I have time only for an obvious essay…). Secondly, the runaway effects on Earth tend to be strongly limited after a while: if it gets way too hot, for example, there will so many clouds, from the steaming oceans, that the ground will be in permanent darkness, and, thus will cool off.

Moreover, the cause of the problem, humanity, would have been put to death, humanely or not, so Earth will have just to wait a millennium or two before enough CO2 will have been recombined in volcanic, and other soil to be removed from the air.

The present rise in CO2, and the rises of temperature and ocean acidity it brings can only be transient, on geological time scale. But it will rush, quasi-instantaneously, on such a scale, to a new equilibrium.

The carbon intense countries are playing with fire. There is so much European countries can do: France is down to 5.1 ton of CO2 emission per capita per year (and much more drastic measures have been taken, such as making carbon burning cars unlawful). The USA, Canada, Australia are above 16 tons per capita, per year. They have to be persuaded to cease and desist. The rest of the world will follow.

Burning Trump himself,  for real or in effigy, may feel good, yet it is neither recommended, nor sufficient, helas…First of all, burning such a mass of decomposing carbohydrates would noticeably augment the CO2 level globally. Secondly, there has been enough words, and empty insults. It’s time for action.

The only really significant action is a global carbon tax. Even Trump, who globally ridiculed himself by rejecting the Paris Climate Accord, like a bloated brat having a fit, could regain some of his lost honor, if he blurted on the international scene, that he has understood only a carbon tax would work, and promote it.

Patrice Ayme’

Genocidal, Racist, Fascist Imperialistic Plutocratic Germany Plotted To Attack The World In 1914

A plutocratic propaganda media, I subscribe to, The Economist, asserted that “France and Britain declared war on Germany and Austria” in 1914. This is contains several lies (France didn’t declare war on Germany and, or Austria; Germany attacked, and declared war the next day; France and Britain didn’t declare war on Austria; actually they were at peace with Austria for several days, as, in spite of tremendous pressure from Berlin, Austria refused obstinately to declare war!)

The preceding lies from plutocratic propaganda support the myth that democratic republic like France are as bad, if not worse, than fascist, racist genocidal tyrannies as Germany was in 1914.

I posted the following: “Contrarily to what The Economist declares and pretends, France did not declare war on Germany first. Instead, Germany gave an ultimatum to neutral Belgium, then attacked Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Then Germany declared war to Belgium and France. Then Great Britain declared war to Germany, for attacking Belgium.”

Germany attacked neutral Belgium after an ultimatum on August 3, 1914 (“Grant free passage for a two million men army, or suffer occupation.”) The Germans behaved like Nazis in 1914. Why? Because they were the Nazis! As simple as that!

Someone called CatalineOnTheHudson replied to Patrice Ayme Tyranosopher, Jul 19th, 20:30 that:

“France did not declare war on Germany first. Instead, Germany gave an ultimatum to neutral Belgium, then attacked Belgium, Luxembourg and France.”

You’re technically correct, and Germany probably should shoulder the greater share of the blame, but you must admit that there is a lot more nuance to the role of Germany (and especially France) than that simple telling of the course of events would lead one to believe. (and that’s before you even get to Britain’s later decision to enter the war; which for really good reasons – that I imagine many of us would still agree with – was clearly not – only – motivated by the invasion/occupation of Belgium).”

I guess Germany should shoulder the greater share of the blame for Auschwitz too! Wow! (That would mean that those roasted at Auschwitz, just as the thousands of Belgian civilians massacred by the German fascists in August 1914, including two-year old girls, should shared some responsibility too! With morality like that, who needs psychopaths?)

This gives me the occasion to correct a ubiquitous perception that a dictatorship which attacked the world was no more at fault than a French Republic which didn’t.

You say: “Germany probably should shoulder the greater share of the blame, but you must admit that there is a lot more nuance to the role of Germany (and especially France) than that simple telling of the course of events would lead one to believe.”

Yes, who needs “courses of events”, when one can indulge in hateful bias? II “must admit”? Why? Because I love a fascist imperialist racist German plutocracy which plotted to attack the world in 1914. On December 11, 1912, six top military officers and the Kaiser secretly decided to make war “within 18 months”. They stated explicitly that they were afraid of the ramping up of the powers of democratic France and democratizing Russia. This, those commanders asserted secretly, would rapidly weaken Germany’s relative military power.

I ‘must admit” one needs to “nuance” truth? One has to be nice to a regime who had racially exterminated several populations in Namibia? Thanks in part to a commander called Goering? (Father of his famous son.)

At midnight on 31 July – 1 August the German government sent an ultimatum to Russia and announced a state of “Kriegsgefahr”.

Germany attacked France in the morning of August 2, 1914, by sending cavalry detachments deep inside France. The first French soldier killed, Caporal Peugeot, died at 10:07 hours on August 2 (his German assailant, Albert Mayer, got shot and killed in return).

The Second German Empire, not a democracy, declared war to the French REPUBLIC, a democracy, the next day, August 3, 1914. More than ten millions would die on the battlefields, thanks to fascist Germany, and another 25 millions would die indirectly, thanks to fascist, idiotic, ravenously militaristic and nationalistic, Jew and French hating Germany.  

Germany then proceeded to kill dozens of thousands of innocent Belgian citizens, at least 6,000 of them in clear and demonstrable atrocities, including babies. The commander at Liege, Ludendorff, was unfortunately not hanged in 1919, as he should have been. Instead he proceeded with a further hatred campaign, the “stab in the back” theory (allegedly by Jews and Commies). Unsatisfied with this, Ludendorff founded what would become the Nazi Party (Hitler was sent to spy on it…)

As Wikipedia puts it: “The beginning of war was presented in Germany as the chance for the nation to secure “our place under the sun,” as the Foreign Minister Bernhard von Bülow had put it, which was readily supported by prevalent nationalism among the public. The Kaiser and the German establishment hoped the war would unite the public behind the monarchy, and lessen the threat posed by the dramatic growth of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), which had been the most vocal critic of the Kaiser in the Reichstag before the war. The SPD ended its differences with the Imperial government and abandoned its principles of internationalism to support the war effort.”

By the time of the British “first shots”, on August 22 1914, dozens of thousands of soldiers had already been killed, on the French side alone. On August 22, 1914, the French army suffered 27,000 killed in combat, in 24 hours.

http://www.france24.com/en/20140822-august-22-1914-battle-frontiers-bloodiest-day-french-military-history

Yes, twenty-seven thousands. The Huns were enraged. As the French had counter-attacked in Belgium, the Huns could only massacre Belgian civilians, in their thirst for barbaric vengeance. In one village alone, more than 100 civilians got assassinated after the French retreat. In particularly poignant case, a very well documented case, a Belgian father was bathing in a river with his two year old little girl. German troops came, and in total cold blood, assassinated both of them. Why was Auschwitz such a big surprise?

As Wikipedia puts it in the “Rape of Belgium”:

War crimes:

In some places, particularly Liège, Andenne and Leuven, but firstly Dinant, there is evidence that the violence against civilians was premeditated.[5]:573–4 However, in Dinant, the German army believed the inhabitants were as dangerous as the French soldiers themselves.[6][7] German troops, afraid of Belgian guerrilla fighters, or francs-tireurs, burned homes and executed civilians throughout eastern and central Belgium, including Aarschot (156 dead), Andenne (211 dead), Seilles (fr), Tamines (383 dead), and Dinant (674 dead).[8] The victims included men, women, and children.[9]

On August 25, 1914, the German army ravaged the city of Leuven, deliberately burning the university’s library of 300,000 medieval books and manuscripts with gasoline, killing 248 residents,[10] and expelling the entire population of 10,000. However, contrary to what many believe and write, it was not the books of the Old University of Leuven which disappeared in smoke; indeed, in 1797, the manuscripts and most valuable works of this university were transported[11] to the National Library in Paris and much of the old library was transferred to the Central School of Brussels, the official and legal successor of the Old University of Leuven. The library of the Central School of Brussels had about 80,000 volumes, which then came to enrich the library of Brussels, and then the future Royal Library of Belgium where they are still. Civilian homes were set on fire and citizens often shot where they stood.[12] Over 2000 buildings were destroyed and large quantities of strategic materials, foodstuffs, and modern industrial equipment were looted and transferred to Germany in 1914 alone. These actions brought worldwide condemnation.[13] (There were also several friendly fire incidents between groups of German soldiers during the confusion.[7]) Overall, the Germans were responsible for the killing of 23,700 Belgian civilians, (6,000 Belgians directly killed, 17,700 died during expulsion, deportation, in prison or sentenced to death by court) and caused further nonfatalities of 10,400 permanent and 22,700 temporary invalids, with 18,296 children becoming war orphans. Military losses were 26,338 killed, died from injuries or accidents, 14,029 died from disease, or went missing.[4]

In the Province of Brabant, nuns were ordered by Germans to strip naked under the pretext that they were spies or men in disguise, and were possibly violated. In and around Aarschot, between August 19 and the recapture of the town by September 9, women were repeatedly victimised. Rape was nearly as ubiquitous as murder, arson and looting, if never as visible.[5]:164–165

The Brits came to the rescue late and few, no more than one French army corps, and they retreated too much, suffering enormous loesses, but it was nice nevertheless!

One of the reasons why Nazism happened, is that racist fascist Germany was not cleaned of its satanic ideology in 1919. To start with, 1,000 German war criminals had to be tried (for show) and hanged. Instead they were left to fester, trying another world war, 25 years later..

To be moral, one has to face the music of real facts. Equating German and French actions in 1914 is a lie, fake history, and an insult to democracy (as found in France then) by assimilating democracy to a vicious, racist, fascist, tyrannical plutocracy, which didn’t hesitate to engage in a world war, just to save its privileges…

People could scoff, and say, who cares about the French? However, that was the road to Auschwitz. Nietzsche had explained this in the 1880s, forecasting that Germany was going to visit unfathomable horrors on Europe and the Jews. It’s really pathetic that, 140 years, and 140 million dead later, one has still to point out that Germany was hell bound in 1914. And that the only treatment possible was what Germany got in World War Two… Thanks to the French! (France declared war to Hitler in 1939, bringing the fall of German viciousness in less than 6 years after that!)

The confrontation between France and Germany in 1914 was between light and darkness, goodness and viciousness, democracy and fully satanic plutocracy. Learn history right, without the nuance of fashionable lies.

Patrice Ayme’.

The Letter & The RE-ENTRANT MIND

Yesterday I got a letter from Barack Obama.

This gracious gesture left a lasting impression. This real fact in the real world, brought my mind to create, all on its own, a reality that had never been before. And will ever last, as far as I am concerned. It’s not just the multiverse, it’s the private multiverse.

Before you think that I am, at last, humbling admitting I am nuts, let me perfidiously add that we all do this, I am just ahead of my time, in observing it, as Nietzsche would modestly point out, if he was writing on my behalf. A core way in which wisdom progresses is by introspection. Introspection: one does not get more core than that. Deeper, more penetrating introspection is future civilization. Perceiving more correctly what perception is was central to the Quantum revolution. Don’t laugh, the inventors of Quantum Mechanics analyzed in-depth what to “experience” meant; an indignant Einstein was reminded by Heisenberg that he and his colleagues were just following the general philosophical principles set by Einstein of considering carefully what was experimentally perceived.   

Last night, I had many dreams, on many things, but in one of them, pretty short, figured Barack Obama, sleeping like a babe, on a makeshift black leather couch system. A running commentary said he was sharing the (very large) room with the US military chief of staff. I was milling around. Something tense about the state of the world was coming down…

After I woke up, I remembered the dream as if it had really happened. So now in my memory system, there is a vivid picture of Obama sleeping as described above. Although it never happened. (I never met Obama in such circumstances.) 

We mostly perceive… what we think. Thus the world as we perceive it, is the exact opposite of what the ancients imagined it to be.

So there was a part of my history, relative to someone else, created by my own mind in the context of the relationship with that person. And it’s pure fiction as a historical fact outside of me, yet, a historical fact as far as my neurocircuitry is concerned.

Plato never talked about such things, nor the parrots who repeated that tyrant lover, ad nauseam.

Plato’s Cave is a rather stupid, certainly very condescending picture of the universe. Moreover, it misunderstands the wall of the cave: it’s actually the universe itself, a universe we partly created ourselves, the universe of our minds, and it’s much richer than the outside world, which only excites, entices, encourages our perception further along.  

This sort of self-made movies does not pertain to my fertile imagination alone. Everybody does it, although the degree of awareness of its genesis varies. From the real world input of sensations and experiences, human minds create a much more complex world amplifying that input in special ways pertaining to their own history. It’s Plato’s cave, in reverse, with much added.

***

Sad was my mood:

What happened is that, after I got the letter yesterday, I had a poignant feeling of what a waste my friend’s presidency has been. Nothing that the innocence of sleep can ever repair, however strong we imagine differently. I remembered the spark of hope, ten years ago. True, a few things were achieved by his presidency (the fact that health insurance companies can’t deny from pre-existing conditions). But much was lost too (inequality has never been so great, and Obama has his name written all over that, including the unresisted and wildly encouraged rise of tech monopolies and the demolition of the Patent System). Pluto-Democrats devoured it all…

***

While my guitar gently weeps…

Patrice Ayme’

Arranging History To Suit Plutocracy: French, Jews, Nazis, & Vel D’Hiv

Consider this: French president Macron declared that: “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism”. A friend of mine asked me what I thought of that idea. I said the obvious. First “antisemitism” is a lie:”antisemitism” as Macron uses it means “antijudaism”. Palestinians are semite, still they tend to be anti-Israel, which, according to Macron, would make them “antisemite”, thus being one thing and its opposite.

Sheer madness. But no accident: an aim of the present world leadership is MAD, not just in the sense of Mutually Assured Destruction, but in the sense that, once we are mad, we won’t make sense, thus they will keep on overwhelming us, because they, and the masters they serve, know very well where they are heading: towards inflicting ever more abuse. Abuse is its own deliriously satisfying power satisfaction.  (A little secret official humanists do not reveal as most of those with power partake in it!)

In green the parts of Europe and Africa under direct German military and government command. What The Vicious (?) Idiots (??) Who Claim France Ordered The Vel D’Hiv Deportation Pretend NOT to understand: Paris was under direct German Third Reich Administration, Subjugation, Enslavement, etc… It was NOT under Vichy putsch regime command (that’s in blue, early in 1942; later the Nazis overtook the entire metropolitan France).

Consider this: the preceding friend, a very educated, multilingual, upper class US citizen, told by me that the USA waited for Hitler to declare war, even after Pearl Harbor, reflectively replied:”Yes, but France had this Vichy government side with the Nazis against the Jews first.”

That is 100% false in several dimensions, each. Yet that several ways grievously erroneous opinion is pretty much ubiquitous in much of the world, inverting the basic facts of France and Nazism. The result being that the country which promulgated Human Rights the most, especially after 1789, is widely perceived as racist and vicious. Guess who profits from this? Global plutocracy, the global enemy of human rights. And who are the paymasters of our global leadership? Global plutocrats.

How did one get there? By myths promulgated by the French authorities themselves, in recent years. And why did those think it was so smart? Because all politicians, worldwide follow the smell of money, just as a viper follows the smell of the mice it just stung.

This would bring us to the touchy subject of who gave Macron the money to buy a one million Euro apartment when he was 25 years old (hint: not his parents, but some very wealthy people). It’s so touchy, I will leave it alone. As my mom said: ”Macron is president, and that’s it.”

Macron just tweeted: Emmanuel Macron‏Verified account: “Je crois à la logique de la confiance…” “I believe in the logic of trust”. Yes, how can one trust France which, according to its president “organized… the death of 13,152 [Jewish] persons”?

Let me reassure you right away: “France” did NOT organize said death of 13,152 persons. Under direct, nearly explicitly lethal, if disobeyed, Nazi orders, French police organized the arrest of (more or less then) illegal foreigners and refugees on Nazi occupied French soil. Not glorious, but the alternative was death at Nazis’ hands for disobedient police (of which there were plenty; ultimately Parisian police would rise in armed rebellion against the Nazis, two years later, when said rebellion was not just suicide). Our great leaders tend to take so many short circuits with truth that their logics blow up, in the maw of reality. This enable them to zap us. Inurement to blowing up of the logics we are submitted and accustomed to, enables our leaders to zap us further.

Thus reality is neither what our great “chiefs” sell, or buy. Madness is more like it.

(An example is the vaunted “Two States solution” in Israel-Palestine which is neither a state, nor a solution.)

***

Mythomania, or how to manipulate We the Peoples:

A head of state is at the head of myths. A head of state speaks with acts. The head of state speaks, even with silence. A head of state can speak with courage. Or cowardice. Or reason, or, even, to future history with future conspiracies, to be unveiled some day.

Except when they are raw truth, those myths are made to manipulate people. The more distant from truth the myth are, the more manipulative. I am a partisan of raw truth. I have found it the best fuel for human destiny.

Hitler described and used what he called the Big Lie technique. There are other methods, though, more akin to the “esprit de finesse” extolled by Macron, the French President. Basic dynamics help to understand what is going on. One Big Lie is the equivalent of a high acceleration: after it, one goes far, fast. But a succession of little lies equivalent to a sum of little accelerations will get you even further, because little lies are harder to detect, and one may be left with dozens of them in just one system of thought, after neutralizing a few. Instead, Nazism rested on less than half a dozen Big Lies.

***

I will illustrate in a further essay how approximations and liberties taken with history can sum up as giant lies, with the case of macron and the Vel d’Hiv. Such lies deserve it, the planet shares them all, and they are used as an excuse to ditch the Enlightenment.

Meanwhile one can read: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/05/01/vel-dhiv-roundup-ordered-by-the-german-nazis-not-france/

The enemies  of France love to confuse the French and the (German!) Nazis. That the latest self-described “chief” of France deems important to promote that identification is an indication of how rotten the head of civilization has become.

Tell me Macron, why is it so crucially important to tell the world that France went “Heil Hitler!” in 1942? Blaming the victim is real foremost? Just a month after Bir Hakiem, when a small French army removed the last hope the Nazis had to win the Second World War?

At Bir Hakeim, the French army of general Marie-Pierre Kœnig delayed by several weeks one of these sickle move of general Edwin Rommel was expert at. Rommel was going to encircle the defeated and retreating British Eighth Army, the only anti-Nazi significant military force between  England and India (with 110,000 soldiers, 850 tanks). Rommel knew that, as he put it “the fate of my army was at stake“. Actually Rommel knew all too well that the fate of the Reich was at stake. 

The Nazi plan was to seize Egypt, then kill all the Jews of Israel, and capture Iraqi oil, desperately needed by the Nazi war machine. In the aftermath of the Nazi defeat at Bir Hakeim, Hitler declared to his cabinet that the French were indeed the world’s best soldiers with his own Nazi soldiers. He added that, thus that’s why exactly Nazi-occupied France had to be completely destroyed, so she couldn’t never rise again.

Bir Hakeim should be as, or more famous than Thermopylae. There 300 Spartans delayed the Persian juggernaut invading Greece by three days. They all died in combat, refusing to surrender. At Bir Hakeim, the French army delayed the Nazi-Italian fascist juggernaut by three weeks. Officially, the French had 141 killed in combat at Bir Hakeim. However, out of 3,700 French soldiers fighting, more than 1,500 disappeared one way or another (many died in the desert during confused night action; the French would burrow in the day, counterattack at night).  

Bir Hakeim forced the Nazis to make an all-out assault towards the Caucasus, to get its oil, which they desperately needed, and, to protect their flank they had to seize the military-industrial city of Stalingrad (although they faced enormous Soviet forces on the way there). That was extremely risky, and the Nazi army was encircled many times in its desperate assault towards Stalingrad (where it would be, unsurprisingly, annihilated).

The highest Nazis (Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich…) had to make the other top Nazi leaders understand, at the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942, in Berlin, 6 months before the Vel d’Hiv, that they should not stand in the way of the “final solution”.  

But all Macron wants children of the world to learn from history is that:  “France organized… the death of 13,152 [Jewish] persons”? With “chiefs” like that, who needs suicide?

Patrice Ayme’

EXTREMES INSTRUCT MIND, and Man, The Extreme Animal

Usually, when thinking of man, one thinks of something noble, higher, ponderate, endowed with Roman “gravitas”, wise. To put it in one expression: Homo Sapiens.

However, where does all this wisdom come from? Experiments! And how, why, would one experiment? By going crazy! Craziness, and a love for extremes. Why? Because: Extremes instructs.

Wingsuit Flier Above French Alps. The rocky twin tower below the flier is the Drus, where yours truly made a semi-demented first ascent (on the other side). I had been a bit riled, after being nearly wiped out by the biggest rock avalanche I ever saw. However the entire pillar collapsed from greenhouse warming a few years later… Demonstrating the lightness of being even with the heaviest mountains.

Going to extremes is how science is made. Every paradigm shattering experiment in physics consists into forcing nature into an extreme apparatus (be it a telescope, microscope, Stern-Gerlach device, cyclotron, or forcing a virus into circumstances which weaken it, until it can be injected for vaccination, etc.).

Going to extremes happen even in mathematics: there, researchers typically play first with baby examples (which are extreme in the sense of being extremely simple, or extremely computable, etc.). For these extremes, they excavate general principles that they then rework in a general theory. (For example, the general theory of curved spaces, pre-Euclid, and before the invention of connection theory by Levi-Civita, assumed spaces with constant curvature, such as the surface of the Earth; that was extreme, in the sense of extremely simple.)

So here we are, and our power has exceeded our planet. To save our environment, we need to extent it through the galaxy, commensurate to our power. We can’t dial back power: our earthly environment, which we have already mauled, will be the first to succumb. So all speed forward, beyond all the last frontiers…

Extreme behaviors have always characterized man. Because we experiment, and experiments are, by definition, risky.  “Per” meant  risk, initially. To engage in risky behavior, we need extreme passion, like the heroes of Homer.

“Plus Oultre!” as Charles Quint put it in his native French: More Beyond!

Science itself is a love of extreme: the meta-motivation of science is to go beyond whatever was figured out prior.    

Experienced extreme-sports enthusiasts are often not reckless, nor do they have some sort of Freudian death wish. Instead, “older” extreme athletes — those who are past their mid-20s — exercise deep care proportional to the high risk involved by the art they specialize in. The analogy with science is striking. Most practitioners of extremely dangerous sports are highly intelligent people, methodological and systematic. They spend years studying the environment and the mechanics involved in order to make it as safe as it possibly can be, in that general framework of extreme danger.

And generally, they have a an extreme goal in mind. The French specialist of wingsuits, who launched the modern version of the sport, wanted to achieve controlled wingsuit landings (he died in Hawai’i, probably from confusion in a jump to resulting from jet lag).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3YLdhraPw

It is often said, and observed, that humans can be, or are, evil. This is caused, in part, by the love of extremes, the love of experiment.

So is it the love of understanding which pushes to extremes, or the love of extremes which pushes towards understanding? That’s a chicken and egg problem: they evolved together, and are not really distinguishable, being both unavoidable parts of the same mechanism.

This also explains why top thinkers all too often get hated and ridiculously molested: as per their art, they are forced to be, in some ways, extreme. At least, relative to the commons. The founder of cynic philosophy Diogenes of Sinope and his admirer the extremely clever Alexander the Great understood this perfectly well.

Of course the New York Times does not. It does not want to. That plutocratic media calls “provocateurs” “hate mongers”, and explain they have to be violently censored to prevent “torment”! Says the NYT: “By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.”

By all means”? Really? Was not the point of the NYT the exact opposite?

I do agree that speech can be violence. However, to explicitly point at people who “provoke” thoughts, and accuse them of causing “torment” is not understanding that we gain insight from extremes.

Thus, the New York Times’ theory of censoring all my comments was grounded in a conspiratorial theory to avoid inflicting torment on plutocrats.

Some will say I am incoherent: I condemned “thought crimes” long ago, and asked for a “Minister of Truth” (underlying the minister of Justice). However the difference are significant: the Qur’an calls to kill some category of people (the Bible does the same, but less… Actually Qur’an refers approvingly to the death sentence against homosexuals in the Bible). If that’s preached as a part of the religion, which it is, stricto sensu, that’s incitation to murder. If done to children it adds child abuse, child endangerment, child pornography, corruption of the youth, etc.

Whereas the New York Times has actively censored scholars who disagree on Quantitative Easing, the capture of politics by plutocracy, calling Islamophobia racism, or whether Christianism terror caused the decline and fall of the Roman State.

The problem with avoiding confrontation in the guise of comfort, is that extremes instruct. No confrontation, no instruction. The New York Times affects not to understand that (in truth it’s just serving the multibillionaire plutocrats who own it, and are hateful of all those who disparage their status).

A young Egyptian yesterday swam to a resort. There, he killed by stabbing, two German tourists. Captured, he recognized that he had “espoused the ideas of Jihadism”. Jihadism in the sense of the literal Qur’an is a vicious ideology incompatible with civilization. Literal Koranic Jihadism is an example of a mentality espousing ideas and practices revealed to be too extreme when they lead to kill innocent people.

Absent real killing and injuring of people, anything should go in the realm of ideas. Fiction literature and movies (even documentaries) are all about letting imagination roam.  

And it better. Because only ever more true ideas will save humanity, and those are born at very high temperature, so high old mental automatisms can melt the erroneous past in a fiery embrace.

Extreme behaviors are us. Including the worst, they are necessary to think forward and anew. There lays survival, and nowhere else.

Patrice Ayme’  

Dark Matter Theories Enlighten Obscure Concept of Explanation

I have struggled with the Foundations of Quantum Physics for decades. Yes, struggle is the meaning of life, as our irascible friend the close-minded Jihadist said, and Albert Camus, too, maybe stimulated by the former, among his colleagues, the Natives of Algeria. I did the deepest studies, I could imagine, plunging in esoteric fields, so deep, I was laughed at, by those who prefer the shallows. Long ago. For example, I thought Category Theory (referred by its critics, then, as “Abstract Nonsense“) should be useful. Then even mathematicians would veil their faces, when Category Theory was evoked. Now, Category Theory is very useful, both in pure mathematics and physics.

The deepest mystery in physics is to understand the Quantum.

Some have sneered:’oh, you lunatic, there is nothing to understand.’ Let them sneer, they are amusing, in their obscurantism. This was always the answer of those who wanted to understand nothing new, in the last ten million years. But the rise of advanced animals is the rise of under-standing. Standing under the appearances of the universe. It is a case where we have to understand what understanding means. 

Giant Galaxy, 1,000 times brighter than Milky Way, ten billion year old, discovered July 2017. It is seen as portions of ring from gravitational lensing by (I suppose) a galactic cluster in between…)

An incontrovertible mystery in physics is Dark Matter. Since the 1930s, we know that there is a massive contradiction between galaxies and gravity. (Between rotations and motions  of galaxies and the theory of gravity, more exactly; be it Newtonian, or its slight modification, Einsteinian gravity.)

So far, physicists have trained less and less conventional explanations of Dark Matter. My own SQPR (SubQuantum Patrice Reality), built to explain the Quantum, provides readily with an explanation of Dark Matter.  It’s completely out of the plane of conventional physics (if you condescend to consider Quantum Field Theory conventional…)

The Superfluid-Anyon model of Dark Matter (“SAD”) supposes that there is a type of particle (anyon) with a strong self-interaction, making a superfluid. In my own theory, SQPR, none of this is supposed.

Some will sneer that I suppose the existence of some properties which give rise to Quantum Physics, and this is what SQPR is. Didn’t Newton, assuredly a greater creature, proclaimed he didn’t make up hypotheses? Right. (Actually the Universal Attraction law was not hypothesized by Newton but by French astronomer Ishmael Bullialdus. So easy for Newton to say; Newton also hypothesized that light consisted of particles, and that he had proven strict equivalence between Kepler’s law and mechanics plus gravity…)

However, to under-stand Quantum Physics, to stand under it, one will have to suppose new, underlying hypotheses explaining the physics of the Quantum. If fundamental, paradigm shifting progress in physics is possible, this is how it will happen.

The leaner those hypotheses, the better. The heliocentric theory of planets’ orbits made FEWER hypotheses than those who believe “heavenly bodies” were special. Why so special? How special? The natural thing

An enormous meteorite, streaked through the skies in a fiery manner, and landed in Northern Greece. It was visited for centuries. Clearly space was full of rocks, no crystal balls…  

Considering other evidences (distance of the sun, computed to be large, thus the sun, enormous), the heliocentric theory was most natural.

Dark Matter may well be the equivalent of that theory. My own SQPR predicts a slow apparition, and built-up of Dark Matter. The latest observations (2017) of Dark Matter and ancient galaxies show no Dark Matter say ten billion years ago.

SAD does not predict that: it predicts Super Fluid Anyon Dark Matter was always there.

Science does not just teach facts and how to organize them in theories. I also teaches what explanations are.

Ex-planation is generally viewed as meaning to spread out. But there is a more striking etymology: An explanation is how to get out (ex) of a plane. In other words, acquiring a further logical dimension.

There is no fundamental new dimension, logically speaking, by supposing one more type of elementary particle. But deducing observed facts from effects which go beyond Quantum Physics would be really a new dimension of logic.

I make hypotheses, but fewer. And they are more natural. That’s the key. When one thinks about it, it was more natural to suppose that, out there in the heavens, matter was as we knew it. Similarly, out there in the Quantum, it is more natural that interactions are as we know them: at finite speed, to preserve causality. This is the most fundamental intuition of SQPR: it supposes that the Quantum Interaction (because spooky action at a distance is still an interaction of some sort) has preserved that fundamental property we observe in all interactions…

By the way, some of the skeptical ones come around, and they sneer that all this science is a wild goose chase after a goose which does not exist. They are mistaken: we are chasing after ourselves. We are chasing after how we explain things.

Even attempted scientific explanation are real, and fruitful. Because scientific activity, even when mistaken, consists in chasing after how we could explain things.

Patrice Ayme’

***

Technical description of SAD from Theory of Dark Matter Superfluidity:

…”a novel theory of DM superfluidity that reconciles the stunning success of MOND (MOdified Newtonian Dynamics) on galactic scales with the triumph of the ΛCDM (Cold Dark Matter) model on cosmological scales (where MOND fails miserably: MOND modifies gravity at some specific distance, way too small for galactic clusters; whereas ΛCDM leaves gravity alone, just adding mass, lots of mass, mass by a factor of ten…).

In the SAD model, the Dark Matter component consists of self-interacting axion-like particles which are generated out-of-equilibrium and remain decoupled from baryons throughout the history of the universe. Provided that its mass is sufficiently light and its self-interactions sufficiently strong, the DM can thermalize and form a superfluid in galaxies, with critical temperature of order ∼mK. The superfluid phonon excitations are assumed to be described by a MOND-like action and mediate a MONDian acceleration on baryonic matter. Superfluidity only occurs at sufficiently low temperature, or equivalently within sufficiently low-mass objects…

 

Antarctica Breaks Apart, In The Middle Of Winter!

It’s not just what, where, but when. In the depth of winter. Even in the depth of winter, Antarctica breaks apart. Larsen C Iceshelf, a vast 5800-square-kilometre iceberg more than a quarter the size of Wales, weighing more than a trillion tonnes, has now calved. It was detected by Nasa’s Aqua MODIS satellite instrument.

The calving reduces the size of the Larsen C Ice Shelf by around 12 per cent and will change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula forever.  

As the iceshelves disintegrate, the feeding glaciers, overland, accelerate and the sea warms further. The Larsen C break forked like a snake tongue, 2 months before breaking. (Meaning more is coming soon!)

Iceshelves are part of Antarctica’s glaciers. They are glaciers which have separated from the rockbed, and start  floating on the sea. Some are 800 kilometers (500 miles) wide, and 800 meters (half a mile) thick.

Just a bit of math: an iceshelf 1000 kms wide extending 1000 kms in the sea, and a kilometer thick weights: 10^6 10^6 10^3 = 10^15 tons, that is one thousand trillion tons. It’s obvious that such an object in the way, especially when anchored here and there to rocky islands, is hard to move. So the iceshelves slow down the interior glaciers of Antarctica, force them to bunch up (thus to receive more snow).

Thus 12% of the Larsen C iceshelf in Antarctica just broke this week. In the middle of Antarctica’s winter. The whole  Larsen C, three times as large as Wales, could well follow…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3nZbIRi7WM

To this a denying insect responded: A. D.. Jordan ridiculously screeched on the Internet: “Perhaps you should complete your story on the Larson [sic] C Ice Shelf story. Scientists who study such things say it will take many years of study to determine if this event was due to what you assert. Fear mongering based on no factual information has been the biggest black eye the Man Made Climate Change folks have suffered.”

When a plane, and, a fortiori, a planet, crashes, one does not wait for “Scientists”, whatever a “scientist” is supposed to be, years from now to deliver a verdict (Darwin, certainly a scientist, was no official “scientist”: he had no serious degree, let alone a “scientist” job… My grandfather, who drew the geological maps of Algeria, had no official geology degree, his “real” job was something else… The point is that good science is what good scientists do, and a tool they use is having a good hunch, or skill; not being corrupt helps.).

The Larsen A and B iceshelves previously disintegrated in a similar fashion. By chance, there an automated weather station in the area of the Larsen B iceshelf when it collapsed into a zillion tiny bergs (all of which Zuck sucks). The disintegration happened in the polar night too. For four days, incredibly warm and powerful foehn wind blew at temperatures exceeding 50 Fahrenheit (and actually 15 Centigrades!)

If all iceshelves of the Antarctic Peninsula disintegrated, we would not need “scientists” to tell us what is going on. Many scientists are on the take: Google will pay “scientists” up to 400,000 dollars to sing the right tune. This methodology, of paying “scientists” was long practiced by the drug industry (of tobacco leaves).

The 180-kilometer-long crack threatening one of Antarctica’s largest ice shelves had branched out, before the break. Radar mapping shows that a second crack has split off from the main rupture like a snake’s forked tongue, the Antarctic Project MIDAS reported May 1. That second branch, which stretches around 15 kilometers, didn’t exist on radar maps taken six days earlier, the scientists say.

Denying the facts of anthropomorphic climate change is dishonest, or ignorant, or both. The map of Antarctica will have to be redrawn, smaller, that’s a fact. The fact that the iceshelf broke in the Antarctic winter is itself telling: that means there is warming even when there is no sun (there can be foehn in the dark, and also the warm circumpolar current is undermining the ice from below; this was long hypothesized by your truly, and it’s increasing becoming a demonstrated fact: warmer water is denser.).

West Antarctica is mostly a huge iceshelf and giant icesheet grounded on rock most of which is way below sea level, as deep as the Grand Canyon (much fun is to be had when warm ocean water sneaks below). It’s also one of the fastest warming region on Earth (more than twice the global rate, that is in excess of 2.5 C, where the average is 1.2 C…) Soon the gigantic icesheet which constitutes most of West Antarctica will turn into an iceshelf, and the denial insects will migrate to higher land from flooded Florida. 

Iceshelves are goners, admire while they last…

In the last ten years, the speed of sea rise, worldwide, has augmented by 50%. It’s already clear that much of Florida will go below the waves (no dam can save it, as the limestone there is porous), very soon. The debate, increasing, is whether we will be able to limit sea level rise in the next few centuries, to 20 meters.

More can be done, like repelling the Donald Trumps at the heart of Anglo-Saxon imperialists. By “Anglo-Saxon imperialists” I don’t mean the British The British, as the good Europeans they are, emit only b. Great Britain has reduced its CO2 emissions by 40% since 1990!

High CO2 emissions have, arguably, to do with the nastiness of a country: Luxembourg, an obnoxious tax haven hidden in plain view inside the European Union, recently emitted 21.4 tons of CO2 per person per year (Luxembourg does not have the excuse of high fossil fuels production, as Qatar, Emirates, Trinidad & Tobago have).

The CO2 emissions, per capita, per year of the EU 28 (European Union including rogue Britain) were less than seven (7) tons in 2015 (and decreasing strongly). By the way, the added value of manufacturing in the EU 28 was on a par with China, and 30% larger than that of the USA. (So the USA can’t retreat behind a cloud of smoky justification that America is Great Again, and has been emitting a lot…)

French CO2 emissions per capita in 2015 were only 5.1 ton (France has the greatest number of nuclear reactors functioning… in the world, even more than the USA).

Australia crows that it didn’t have a recession in 20 years. That’s true, but it’s also true that Australia is a massive producer and exporter of CO2 generating substances. The CO2 emissions per head in Australia are 18.6 tons, mostly from coal used in power generation. Natural gas is frantically exported to other countries, which made the city of Adelaide recently go without electricity, when the gas ran out…  

Canada, with its boyish heir to the throne, Trudeau, is paying lip service to climate change, all cosmetic: in spite of giant hydropower in some states, for example Quebec, the country is a miserable 15.5 tons per capita per year in CO2 emissions. Mostly because Canada selfishly, not to say dementedly, insists to produce and export the world’s most polluting fuel, tar sands. I guess, when you have killed nearly all the Indians and French-Indian metis, you may as well try to kill the rest of the planet too. Good things have come out of these massacres… (I feel, that, as Putin himself had the impudent honesty of recognizing, higher-ups in Canada believe that global warming is a good thing. Some of Trump’s advisers have expressed the same feelings, long hidden at the top of America…)

A few months ago, during the Austral summer, a French expedition pushed towards the Totten glacier, not far from the Dumont Durville station. They dived along the massive cliff of the iceshelf.

The French have the only autonomous scaphander tech to dive in subfreezing waters: the equipment weights hundreds of pounds and is figured as cover story in National Geographic, July 2017. The entire swimsuit has several layers, one of them being electrically heated… The report is fascinating:

“Deepest Dive Ever Under Antarctica Reveals a Shockingly Vibrant World. 
Our special report offers a rare look at life beneath the frozen continent—where penguins, seals, and exotic creatures thrive.
Tendrils of ice-covered brine, or brinicles, leak from sea ice near East Antarctica’s Dumont d’Urville Station. Ephemeral and seldom seen, they form when trapped, supercooled brine escapes from the ice and freezes less salty seawater…”

Notice the hanging tentacles of ice…

The French scientists dived next to a towering cliff, and expected the ice to go deep, hundreds of meters deep. Instead, it mysteriously stopped, sort of right away. The scientists were floored by this discovery. In my humble opinion, it seems the ice is just hanging there from a cantilever effect. That would explain why the iceshelves so readily disintegrate… It also mean the ice is melted from below by the warm circumpolar current, irresistibly gnawing, preparing to spring a nonlinear trap, onto a humanity in denial…

Global warming is a fact, not just a theory! Yet, it gives us the occasion of drawing conclusions about national moods…

Patrice Ayme’

Zuckerberg Sucks Bergs

Zuckerberg, Facebook main owner: “Priscilla and I spent the weekend around Homer, Alaska as part of the Year of Travel challenge. It’s beautiful here.” Next week, he does Bali? How does he travel there? Cattle class? Probably a personal jumbo jet, like the Google guys. Full of an army of bodyguards. Could we emit more CO2 please, Antarctica is not breaking apart fast enough! OK, I have been to Alaska more than once, it’s incredibly beautiful there. But I also have (lots of) close family in Alaska (thus a good excuse to visit).

Zuckerberg: “Alaska has a form of basic income called the Permanent Fund Dividend. Every year, a portion of the oil revenue the state makes is put into a fund. Rather than having the government spend that money, it is returned to Alaskan residents through a yearly dividend that is normally $1000 or more per person. That can be especially meaningful if your family has five or six people.

This is a novel approach to basic income in a few ways. First, it’s funded by natural resources rather than raising taxes. Second, it comes from conservative principles of smaller government, rather than progressive principles of a larger safety net. This shows basic income is a bipartisan idea.”

Zuck is poorly informed: the dividend used to be much more than $1000 per year per person. But now the state is heading towards heavy debt, from the collapse of oil revenues. Zuck also has some cheeks, to call “especially meaningful” to earn one thousand dollars a year, when he earns personally several billions dollars every few months.  Notice in passing that smaller government and eschewing “progressive principles of a larger safety net… is a bipartisan idea”. According to him.

***

Pluto Zuck says: …“basic income… [to be] funded by natural resources rather than raising taxes. Second, it comes from conservative principles of smaller government, rather than progressive principles of a larger safety net. This shows basic income is a bipartisan idea.” So go hunt in the forest: there are your natural resources. “Conservative principles of smaller government… is a bipartisan idea”. Progressive principles are not bipartisan.

In other words, the bipartisan party is the plutocratic party. It’s also ironical, that a “larger safety net” is to be avoided: except for Zuck himself, who needs to be protected by his own private army.

In San Francisco where Zuckerberg (also) resides, those who bother his army of bodyguards are thrown in prison, three months at a time. A man sleeping outside Zuckerberg in his car was put in prison. In his other mansion in Palo Alto, Zuckerberg, college drop-out, but NSA collaborator, receives the safety net of 16 bodyguards, 24/7. It was not enough to buy the four mansions around his own… to insure his own “progressive principles of a larger safety net”. 

In Zuckerberg’s world, the world is about Zuckerberg. Serving Zuckerberg’s safety.

Not happy? You are probably “an unstable Internet user” and you should move to Alaska! There, you can go, live off “natural resources” as native Americans do so successfully, hunting bears and the like.

***

Not only Zuckerberg sucks the teat of state, but he gives us lessons about us, low lives, needing to quit the habit…

While claiming he does not, as demonstrated by his desire to make the state much smaller … forgetting that Facebook, operating hand in hand with US intelligence, has made the state so much larger and omnipresent. This is a deliberately confusing circus, or, as the Guardian puts it: “Mark Zuckerberg is part of the bigger trend of global companies expecting the state to pick up the tab even though they’re not prepared to pay the taxes to fund it.”

I have long said this, attracting opprobrium. Zuckerberg is also representative of these new plutocrats who treat the elected butlers supposed to represent us, as pigeons fighting for crumbs.

The Guardian has finally noticed how far the outrageous behavior of the Facebook founder will go. In “Mark Zuckerberg’s got some cheek, advocating a universal basic income”, Sonia Sodha observes that:

“Facebook’s CEO has spent the last couple of years casting himself in various guises. First, global philanthropist: he and his wife last year pledged to invest $3bn over 10 years in order to eradicate global disease (a well-meaning if hopelessly naive sentiment; it’s a tiny fraction of what’s spent on medical research worldwide). Most lately, social commentator: Zuckerberg is currently undertaking a 50-state meet-and-greet tour across the United States. Little wonder rumours are flying that he fancies himself for an imminent White House run.

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg aim to ‘cure, prevent and manage’ all disease?

Put aside for a moment the chilling thought that if the chief of the world’s most ubiquitous media platform chose to run to be leader of the free world, his command of Facebook’s unrivalled ability to profile, segment and target voters might make him all but unbeatable. What might he do as president? The missives from his grand tour – published, of course, on Facebook – provide some clues. Last week’s was from Alaska. Zuckerberg used it as an opportunity to heap praise on the idea of a universal basic income – an unconditional income paid by government to all citizens, regardless of whether or not they’re in work.”

***

Plutocrats love men, as lions do, with no government to protect them:

We are told Marc Zuckerberg, his wife, Priscilla Chan, and their ilk, are “lovers of man” (phil-anthropos). The wealthiest spy agency operators in the world are “persons who seeks to promote the welfare of others”. Does that mean we don’t? Does that mean we don’t promote the welfare of others? Does that mean that one has to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes, to be called a lover of man? Does that mean one has to run the world’s largest spying operation, to be called a “lover of man”? Does that mean we have to pledge billions of tax money we should have paid to be called a “lover of man”?

The generosity of bandits has no limits: their survival depends upon it.

Let’s do a little computation. The median family income in the USA is 60 K. The median worth, a bit more. So “worth” and yearly income are roughly the same. Scaling this up to Zuckerberg, this means the plutocrat controls money flows of the order of his wealth, each year. Namely 50 billions. (Facebook’s revenue in 2016 was actually $28 billion.)

***

Zuckerberg and Chan claim they want to save the world, do good. But they are living, impudent, obvious, blatant symbols of inequality, the greatest factor in human misery. The more unequal a society the more selfish, violent, stupid, insane, ill, unfair, demented a society is. If Zuck Zuck and Chan were sincere, they would fund an academy for the reduction of inequality. If Zuckerberg was sincere,he would advocate for higher taxes. Instead, he advocates for the exact opposite, and he basically pays no taxes already (relative to his income and effective control output)

***

Separation of wealth and state violated:

In other words Zuckerberg directly directs the flow of 1/1000 of the world economy. However, Zuckerberg’s influence is far more ranging: Zuckerberg has been received in all the presidential palaces and heads of governments mansions, in the countries which really matter, including China. Why do the mightiest receive the wealthiest in the halls of power? Isn’t this, per se, a violation of the separation of wealth and state?

Presumably, Zuckerberg and his ilk are negotiating his power of influence versus the future incomes of elected officials, their kin, friends, children… Zuckerberg and his ilk are together-breathing (con-spirare) with the mightiest politicians. The latter are ephemeral, Zuckerberg is permanent. Here is The Guardian again:

***

“Zuckerberg’s got some cheek. The idea of a universal basic income is all very well and good in sparsely populated Alaska, where revenues from natural oil fund a modest annual dividend to the state’s permanent residents that in the last decade has varied between $800 and $2,000.

But the proponents of a basic income often talk it up as replacement for welfare benefits altogether. Funding a decent safety net that gets paid to everyone – where there isn’t a multibillion-dollar state-backed fund conveniently created in the 1970s from oil reserves – would be very expensive. The cash would either have to come from hiking up taxes or significantly cutting back state spending on other services, such as education and health.

Here’s the rub. Zuckerberg has no right to pronounce on what the welfare state should look like while Facebook takes aggressive measures to minimise its tax burden. Here in the UK, Facebook paid just £4,327 in corporation tax in 2014, despite paying its UK staff bonuses of £35m. In 2015, it offset its tax bill of £4.2m against a tax credit of £11.3m – despite making global profits of almost £5bn.”

***

Work is power, so we will take it away from you, replace it by basic income, say Silicon Valley plutocrats;

This is an infection: those plutocrats rule the world. Just as when the Roman Republic started to die, they have found tricks to avoid taxes, by using globalization, exactly as the Roman plutocrats did!

“It’s not just Facebook: global tech giants such as Amazon and Google are notorious for exploiting every loophole to get out of paying their fair share of tax. It’s deeply hypocritical for Zuckerberg to back the idea of a state-based income while his company does everything it can to avoid paying tax. And there’s a clue Zuckerberg sees a basic income as a replacement for, not in addition to, public services, “It comes from conservative principles of smaller government, rather than progressive principles of a larger safety net,” he writes.

Zuckerberg is not the first Silicon Valley CEO to talk up universal basic income: it’s an idea fast gaining traction in that corner of California. This is no coincidence. One of the beliefs that powers Silicon Valley’s fervent tech worship is the idea that artificial intelligence and automation will one day spell the end of work. This is implicit in the business plans: Uber’s growth strategy, for instance, is based on the idea that driverless technology will one day replace its drivers altogether.”

***

The More Income Inequality In A Country, The More Drug Use:

Thanks, oh you, billionaires! As Inequality Has Exploded in the USA in recent years, thanks to Obama’s Quantitative Easing and pro-plutocratic monopolies ploy, so has drug usage. There are now more death from drugs than from cars of shootings.

***

How come cockamamie plutocrats? Lack of basic education!

Most plutocrats are actually rather ignorant: Zuckerberg, Gates have no college degrees (Whereas Warren Buffet has a master of science in economics from Columbia U). They didn’t go through basic education. If he had, maybe Zuckerberg would realize the income per capita of Alaskan citizen used to be ten times more (in constant dollars). I wouldn’t be surprised if it had disappeared next year. Zuck probably knows nothing of the history of the price of oil.

About three out of 10 billionaires—29.9%—around the world did not have at least a bachelor degree in 2015, according to a billionaire census by Wealth-X. That’s 739 out of the total 2,473 billionaires.

It’s a bit of a problem, because these people are leading the world’s politicians by the nose at this point. They think they are the smartest, but, typically, they confuse smarts, greed, happenstance, and conspiracy (“Social Networks” and other high-tech as a spy agencies…)

To mitigate this capture of politics by one needs to introduce a good dose of direct democracy: then the orders will be coming not from the wealthiest, stupidest people in the world, but directly from We The People, as they did in Athens, Rome, and now Switzerland…

 

***

Civilization means government. Big Government started with Trajan, then the Merovingians:

Let’s backtrack a bit: Roman emperor Trajan fostered higher taxes on the wealthiest to enable a welfare state, including food distribution to the poor, government scholarship to meritorious students. Under Trajan, initially a general a bit similar to Eisenhower, the Roman empire reached its largest extent (Trajan ruled from 98 CE to 117 CE). Where did Trajan get his ideas? Trajan ingratiated himself with the Greek intellectual elite, including historians such as Plutarch and Dio (who was recalled to Rome). Be it Athenian leaders such as Pericles, or the kings of France in the Twelfth or Fourteenth centuries, massive progress was directly attributed with civilization class intellectuals interfacing directly with the leaders: the edge of civilization is one, top thinking allow it to cut. (De-cide means, exactly, to cut-off!)

Starting in the Sixth Century, the Merovingian Franks (ruling France and Germany, and soon, all of Europe) made secular education global, mandatory, and non-profit. Secular education became a function the government imposed on the Churches (the Pope got infuriated in vain). Later more government in the Middle Ages imposed more functions: not just free universities, but free health care, taking care of abandoned babies, no questions asked.

The “small government” movement championed by Silicon Valley monopolists inverts all this: students pay something like a third of the median family income, to attend the “public” university of California in tuition alone (not counting room and board). Meanwhile top plutocrats in the USA have earned hundreds of billions from the private healthcare system of the USA (and then claim to be democrats, and give to the “Democratic” Party which enabled their lucrative activities…)

Facebook & its ilk want to cut all that government down, so that they instead, are the oligarchy: the few (oligo) who rule. They have already achieved that status, hence their insolence and impudence. If Teddy Roosevelt were around, he would mount his white charger, and arrest them all at gunpoint, for violating anti-monopoly laws.

As The Guardian observes: “Obsessing about a universal basic income as the panacea for the shortcomings of the labour market of the future is a distraction from tackling the problems in the labour market of today.” Well, that’s exactly why they obsess: it’s very self-serving: the plutocrats want slaves.

Not just that, but the plutocrats’ obsession with self-serving issues invites us all to obsess with them on the same issues, instead of asking why is it that they pay so little taxes, have so much power, are constantly received by ephemeral power holders, have bent the tax code to serve themselves, name hospitals after themselves, made deals with spy agencies to “open backdoors”, and all sorts of deals which are rumored about in Silicon Valley, etc

***

Bigger Civilization, Bigger Government:

It’s no coincidence that the biggest civilizations had the biggest (and best) governments: Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Achaemenid Persia, Rome, China, France…

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/synthesis-found-governmentalism/

When we consider the progress of civilization over the last 4000 years, we observe an ever greater power of just, fair, balanced, and intelligent government. However, Zuckerberg’s operation is none of this: it’s just a one man show. Put a representation of part of the anatomy of a human female chest, Zuck will get you banned. The guy is that dumb. And that’s why he wants to rule the world.

Sonia Sodha concludes: “We should be fighting for a society in which everyone has the right to a decently paid job that provides them with autonomy and fulfilment; not a future in which a big chunk of the population is consigned to exist on meagre state handouts. At best, a universal basic income is a dangerous diversion from how to improve the quality of work. At worst, it could be an enabler for the dark motives of the Silicon Valley tech scene. We’d be naive to buy into the idea that the owners of the robots would happily carry on paying the rest of us a basic income if it no longer suited them. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave at this fundamental misunderstanding of how economic power works.”

Zuckerberg himself is an epiphenomenon, like a flake of snow shining on top of the iceberg of the inversion of all values, which has led to a stalling of civilization and endangerment of the biosphere. The cult of The One is the ultimate form of intellectual fascism. It has led to tax-free monopolies in the global economy, but it was preceded by a cult of celebrities… even in science, and other intellectual domains, where only a few, the stars, get funded well.

It’s as if Usain Bolt’s starting line was ten meters ahead, noticed the scientific journal Nature in “Our obsession with eminence warps research“: “We can quantify exactly how much faster Usain Bolt is than the next-fastest sprinter. It’s much harder to say who is the best scientist, let alone how much better they are than the next-best scientist. Deciding who deserves recognition is, at least in part, a judgement call.”

It’s even harder to find out who the best thinkers are, and what the best thinking is. However, what we have now is plutocrats and their lackeys dominating the debate. There is not even an independent intellectual class, as most intellectuals in academia are on the take, or know they should have a low profile. Superstars dissenters tend to be all barking up the wrong tree (although The Guardian essay quoted above is a good sign).

A fundamental democratic right in Ancient Greece was isegoria. The right to speak equally. It is massively manipulated nowadays. The ownership of all media by the plutocratic class has led to a situation where lowering taxes on the hyper-wealthy has become “bipartisan”, and earning one thousand dollar a year is “especially gratifying” in the eyes of those earning billions a year, and they can then advertise their “love of man” and flaunt their pledges to give billions, well, you know, someday…

All these self-important tax cheating, conspiring monopolists at the teat of governments, worldwide, deserve out contempt. Really, not kidding: New York Times bans me. Who is the greatest holder of common shares of the NYT? Carlos Slims, scion of a plutocratic Mexican family. How did he become for a while the world’s richest man? Because Mexican government officials conspired to offer him Mexican Telecom at rock bottom prices. No doubt: they were well rewarded.

Now we see these government connected billionaire punks, going around the world in their personal jumbo jets, paying their way through government, media and academic circles, to mold decisions in their favor. And what of all the CO2? What of the greatest biological extinction now apparently forming and accelerating?

They don’t care: as they circle the globe in their CO2 spewing jumbo jets, billionaires and their obsequious political butlers suck entire iceberg in the maw of the global warming they generate, and it’s their friend, because they profit from disaster (be only as a distraction from their ill deeds…)

We are facing an inversion of all civilization, and even the biosphere. Plutocrats and their ideology are the prophets of the extinction of all values, and of all worth.

Patrice Ayme’

Why The Crusades Were Lost: Saint Louis’ Racism Against The Mongols!

Islam came to near annihilation in the Thirteenth Century as Franks and Mongols unified and took the Islamist capitals, Baghdad and Damascus. A little known episode. At the time, the overall Mongol Khan was a woman (another little known episode!) But she didn’t cause the problem. Instead Saint Louis’ jealous racism, and unbounded hatred of “infidels” made the difference.

Richard the Lionheart lived in France, where he was supposedly vassal to the king of France, Philip II Augustus his companion in arms (who left the so-called “Holy land” after a while, leaving his soul mate Richard, in charge). Richard may not have lost major battles. But, a century later, Saint Louis, Louis IX of France, did, and ruined France in the process.

It became clear nothing good was achieved by all this crusading. On top of that, the climate started to wobble. Instead, the French switched to the trading model with Islam (rendered possible by treaties consecutive to the Crusades). Immense fortunes were made (Jacques Coeur, born a commoner, became the richest man in France by trading with the Levant in the fifteenth century, and soon, master of the mint, and a most important European diplomat).

Arab chroniclers used the correct term, “Franki” (Franks) to qualify the Europeans trying to (re)conquer the Middle East from the religion of Islam, which had smothered it.

By the time the Crusades were launched, direct Muslim aggression against Europe has been continuous since 715 CE, a full four centuries (the word “Europe” was used first by the Franks in the context of the Muslim invasions). This continual Muslim attack was viewed, correctly, by all concerned, as the continuation of the war of Islam against Rome. (Naturally so, as the Franks so themselves as “Rome”. By 800 CE, the Franks had officially “renovated”, as they put it, the Roman empire…)

Painted in 1337 CE. Notice that the Franks are covered in armor, and the Muslims are not. Obvious technological superiority. The Romans already bought light steel helmets in Gaul! Muslim tech superiority is a lie. In plain view.

There is plenty of evidence that the Franks were more advanced than the Muslims in crucial military technology, as early as 715 CE. How could they not be? The Muslims were just coming out of savage Arabia, all the technology they had, was stolen, or, let’s say, adopted from others.

Four terracotta hand grenades, with “Greek Fire” inside, used by the defenders of Constantinople against the Turks. Greek Fire had many variants, some secret to this day. The Chinese developed dry versions, with salpeter, which turned into black powder later.

The Franks, who had been the crack troops of the Roman empire, as early as 311 CE, had better steel, better armor, better steel weapons, and giant war horses capable of wearing armor themselves. That’s why the Franks were able to defeat the Muslims, overall, in the first phase of the war with Islam, which was in Europe (711 CE, attack on Spain, until the counterattack on Jerusalem, 1099 CE).

This European technological superiority was obvious during the Spanish reconquista. An armored Spanish horse was like an intelligent, indomitable battle tank, which would charge again and again, rarely seriously wounded. By contrast, Muslim cavaliers wore little armor, their relatively small Arab horses were excellent but all too little (I used to ride my own very combative Arab stallion in Africa, which nobody else would, or could, ride… Its name, appropriately chosen, was Napoleon…).

Horse archers were not effective against heavily armored cavalry. They could bother it, but not defeat it. This is why the Mongols decided wisely not to attack the Franks again, after invading, suffering huge losses, Hungary, and Croatia. The Mongols debated what had happened to their ancestors the Huns, eight centuries earlier, in France (annihilation spared only political decision). The Mongols used rocket artillery.

Noah Smith wrote “Why Did Europe Lose the Crusades?“. Said he: “A little while ago, I started to wonder about a historical question: Why did Europe lose the Crusades? The conventional wisdom, at least as I’ve always understood it, is that Europe was simply weaker and less advanced than the Islamic Middle Eastern powers defending the Holy Land. Movies about the Crusades tend to feature the Islamic armies deploying fearsome weapons – titanic trebuchets, or even gunpowder. This is consistent with the broad historical narrative of a civilizational “reversal of fortunes” – the notion that Islamic civilization was much more highly advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages. Also, there’s the obvious fact that the Middle East is pretty far from France, Germany, and England, leading to the obvious suspicion that the Middle East was just too far away for medieval power projection.

Anyway, I decided to answer this question by…reading stuff about the Crusades. I read all the Wikipedia pages for the various crusades, and then read a book – Thomas Asbridge’s “The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land“. Given that even these basic histories contain tons of uncertainty, we’ll never really know why the Crusades turned out the way they did. But after reading up a bit, here are my takes on the main candidate explanations for why Europe ultimately lost.”

He pursue by fingering “lack of motivation” as the main cause of the loss of the Crusades. That is true, in part: Europe opened to the ocean. However, the Crusades won in important ways (opening up trade). But the Europeans also really lost, when it would have been easy to win.

Noah Smith’s analysis focuses only on the English (so to speak) aspect of the Crusades. He does not quite say that a rogue frankish army seized Constantinople in 1204 CE. And then he omits completely what happened in the Thirteenth Century (because Richard Lionhearted was then dead, and history is all about the Anglois?).

For politically correct reasons, some of them ten centuries old, some more voguish, allegations have been made of the superiority of Islam (or China, for that matter). These (often self-serving from racist self-declared anti-racists) assertions are not grounded in fact.

By 1000 CE, the Franks had the highest GDP per capita in the world, and its history. European technology was, overall, the most advanced. Europeans were stunned by how little the Chinese used machines and animals.  

The Arabic numbers were Greek numbers perfected in India, where the full zero was invented, and were reintroduced through central Asia. Out of the 160 major work of Antiquity we have, 150 survived in European monasteries, the universities of the time (and the ten remaining were saved by the Persians, initially).

The Middle East, long the cradle of most invention, has been clearly a shadow of its former self, ever since Islam established its dictator, intolerance and war friendly terrorizing culture of god obsession.

Crusades in the Middle east until 1204; The image Noah Smith uses, which misinforms the reality of what happened…

Europe didn’t “lose the Crusades”. Saint Louis did. Europe didn’t just decide the Middle East was hopeless, in all sorts of ways. Europe had got reopening of the Silk Roads from Saladin. Meanwhile in 1244, the Khwarezmians, recently pushed out by the advance of the Mongols, took Jerusalem on their way to ally with the Egyptian Mamluks. Europe shrugged (by then “Roman” emperors such as Frederick I Barbarossa had used a Muslim company of bodyguards… So there was strictly no anti-Muslim hatred and racism… contrarily to what happened with the Mongols, see below…) 

It is also true that Saint Louis, a weird mix of a dangerous religious fanatic of the worst type, and a modern, enlightened king, lost its entire army (to a woman, the only female leader Islam ever had!) in Egypt. Saint Louis was taken captive at the Battle of Fariskur where his army was annihilated. He nearly died, was saved from dysentery by an Arab physician (impressed Arabs offered for him to rule them). A huge ransom had to be paid, comparable to the French budget. Then Saint Louis died in front of Tunis, in another ridiculous crusade (1270 CE).  Louis fell ill with dysentery, and was cured by an Arab physician

The Seventh and Eight Crusades were disastrous military defeats

Saint Louis, a racist, was the direct cause of the survival of Islam. The Mongols, allied to local Franks had destroyed Baghdad (siege of the Abbasid Caliphate) and Damascus (siege of the Umayyad). The Mongols asked respectfully to make an official alliance with Christianity, and eradicate Islam.

Instead the Pope called Nestorian Christian Mongols heathens, and him and Saint Louis promised excommunication to all and any Frank joining the Mongols in war. Thus the Mongols attacked Egypt without Frankish help, and were defeated by the Mamluks Turks.

Dejected, the Mongols decided that they were Muslims (Islam has no pope, and the Caliphate had been destroyed by the Franco-Mongol alliance ) Under Timor Lame, they would carve a giant Mongol-Muslim empire all the way into India.

This is just a fraction of the common operations of the Franks and Mongols, when they were allied against the Muslims, destroying Baghdad, seizing Damascus. Saint Louis and his pet the Pope saved Islam by calling a halt to the cooperation. Mongols and Franks actually took Damascus together, and the commanders entered the conquered city, side by side…

The Spanish were more serious. They, Isabella, Ferdinand and their advisers, planned to pursue the reconquista by extirpating Islam from North Africa and the Middle East.

The extremely well-trained, battle hardened army was prepared, but then the Americas had just been discovered, and war with France for the control of the world in general and Italy in particular, became everything. Spain engaged in a war with France it took nearly two centuries to lose. The conquest of the Americas changed the world, though. The reconquest of the Christian empire from the Muslims was given up…

It could have been done: the Spanish occupied many cities of North Africa, including Algiers and Oran. Power was divided between Ottoman pirates (“Barbarossas”) and the kingdom of Tlemcen. In any case, in 1525 CE, while Cortez was conquering Central America, defeating among others, the Aztecs, pirates retook Algiers in the name of the Turk Selim 1. At the same time, Selim defeated the Egyptian Mamluks, taking control of the Levant, Mecca, and Egypt.

Islam, a pretty deleterious religion in its literal, Salafist form, survived. North Africa and the Middle East, previously long the world’s wealthiest place, is now the poorest and most war-ridden…

And the war goes on, the ideology of Salafist, literal Islam, being fundamentally antagonistic to civilization.

For the USA, the Iraq war has been an enormous victory: it boosted the price of oil for a decade, enabling the massive deployment of US fracking. Now the USA is again the world’s number one fossil fuel producer. Also French and US military forces are fighting from Mali to Afghanistan, maintaining economic and military control over an area still crucial for energy production (although it will soon become economically irrelevant, from renewable energy).  

All the regimes from Mali to Afghanistan, are, officially, friendly to civilization. So why does the war goes on? Because the ideology is islam is centered on Jihad, no holds barred. Thus Islam gives a ready ideology to those who want to make no holds barred. This is why the Turks converted to islam. Within a generation, they had invaded a huge swathe of Central Asia, and overran very old civilization: Georgia, Armenia, and the Oriental Romans (“Constantinople”).

Then Christian pilgrims going to Jerusalem were massacred (up to 10,000 at one time) by various Muslim potentates. Constantinople, having lost half of its territory, to the recently converted, ferociously invading Turks, asked the “Occidental” Roman empire to come to the rescue.   

In 1095 Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in a sermon at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military intervention for the so-called Byzantine Empire and its Emperor, Alexios I, who needed desperately to stop the westward invasion of the migrating Turks colonising Anatolia.

Morality of all this? What people think they know about history has little to do with what really happened. The forces presently in conflict have been in conflict ever since Islam exists, as Muhammad wanted it. The Quraish, in Mecca, the dominant tribe Muhammad belonged to, didn’t trust Muhammad: he was an analphabet and an epileptic. To boot, Muhammad succeeded in life by marrying a wealthy business woman, and then switching from caravan trading, to caravan raiding.

Just before he died, Muhammad led the first attack against the Romans (who had not attacked him, and refused combat). War is the great arbiter of human destiny. The enormous Roman field army, horrendously led erroneously, was annihilated on its third day of battle at Yarmouk against the Arab Muslim army. Emperor Heraclius, a great general had not been present, he was in Alexandria.

War is a great arbiter, but it is also extremely fickle. Crucial battles are won, and lost, which should never have been won, or lost. Sometimes by sheer happenstance, sometimes from hubris, sometimes by having top generals with top armies not considering the worst imaginable case (as happened to the Romans when fighting the Arabs at Yarmouk, or with Yamamoto at Midway, or the French mid May 1940…).

To learn from history, it has to be learned in full. Civilization missed a chance to eliminate the Islamist war ideology when it aborted the natural alliance with the Mongols. But it’s not very surprising: the overall leader of Europe, then, was Saint Louis. Saint Louis invented the modern justice system, and put his mother, Blanche de castille, in charge of France for many years. So he could be viewed as non-sexist and all for justice. He is represented to this day, rendering justice below an oak. However, Saint Louis was also a savage. He really believed that unbelievers should be killed painfully. Interestingly, Saint Louis came to believe that the Muslims were believers: his fanatical rage was oriented towards Jews and those who, in Christendom, did not believe. So it’s entirely natural that, by considering the Mongols heathens, and forbidding a further alliance with them, he would, in the end, save Islam!

It’s not just that Saint Louis burned 12,000 Jewish manuscripts in Paris, in 1243 CE (5 years before he led the disastrous Seventh Crusade). Saint Louis wrote abominable descriptions of the atrocious ways in which he would kill infidels (I read it in the original texts long ago; however, I was unable to find a source today…)

We have Jihadists around, ready to kill the innocent nowadays, because Saint Louis was actually one of them!

Patrice Ayme’

The Purpose of Life: Harari, Gates, Yours Truly…

Get a GRRIP: Gates, Harari, Homo Deus, Debunked & Amplified:

Abstract: After describing a bit the work of Harari, who just sold 3 million books in China alone, we focus on what Bill Gates below sees as Harari’s main gist. Then I present my own version of the purpose of human life. I expand on the notion of raw realism, what I call GRRIP, the driver of human evolution.

***

Yuval Noah Harari, a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, writes the sort of books I would have like to have written myself, because of the many statements highly compatible with my philosophy. However, the gentleman is not the deepest form of thinker there is, so I still think my writings have meaning… Moreover, he and Bill Gates, who gives his opinion below, claim that the “purpose of life” consists into serving a superior class. I sort of agree, as long as said class is superior thinking, not a tiny minority of greedy individuals… 

Harari seesm to embrace what I believe is the reality one should all embrace, to optimize collective survival and happiness GRRIP: Grave Raw Reality Inevitable Principle: Raw Reality is a Grave thing, but it can’t be be avoided, so we may as well consider it to be a Principle (just like God is a Principle of power, GRRIP has even more power, see the White Phosphorus below…) As an Israeli, Harari lives in a grave reality, and Gates, as we will see, believes hard to find a purpose in life if all children have a nice life (I agree that’s a surprising point of view, especially considering Gates views himself as charity prone, not to say charitable!)

My take on it? The purpose of life is a vast generalization of what Bill Gates is trying to say. Starting from GRRIP, I conclude that:

THE MORE WE HOLD TO DEAR LIFE, THE MORE MEANING WE ARE PROVIDED WITH! This is why people like to do dangerous & crazy things! They are addicted to meaning! (Some may say that Camus opined a bit like that in his famous “Myth of Sisyphus“. Except Sisyphus is doing a boring task, whereas human beings in full are too excited by danger to be bored; I am not exactly recommending this, to live a life of danger and terror, I just say that this is the circumstances in which our species evolved, and thus, our brains become fully functional only then, and when such an environment is provided…)

***

Harari Makes Statements I Have Made Forever:

“In the 300 years of the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these persecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians. In contrast, over the course, of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions, to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.”

― Yuval Noah Harari, קיצור תולדות האנושות 

White Phosphorus Exploding Out Of A Shell Over Mosul, June 2, 2017. The Anti-Islamist Coalition Is Fighting Literal Abrahamism, An Intrinsically Let’s-Kill-Our-Children-For-Our-Boss religion. Hence the necessity to use pretty ugly weapons.

The reason for Christianism was to make average people into sheep so that Roman Catholic emperors and their class could terrorize and exploit the 99%. As Voltaire, himself definitively a part of the .1%, as he was personal friend of Louis XV, asserted:  

“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

[Nietzsche basically went lyrical on this idea already found in Voltaire, a century later. Let’s notice this in passing… So much for Friedrich’s originality…]

“Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.” (Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.)

And right history does not just teach the future, but feeds the imagination:

“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”

― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

***

Contrarily To What Harari Claims, Life Has A Scientific Meaning, However Modest:  

Of course I understand, and sort of approve, the following assertion:

“As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.”  (Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.)

A superior philosophical attitude requires more modesty about what the universe is really up to: suppose that it turns out we are the only civilization in the entire observable universe (as observed, so far). Would that make us delusional, if we attribute importance to ourselves? Arguably not!

“Purely scientific viewpoint”: for me, science is what is known with certainty. The purpose of life has not been studied enough to even guess what it could be to ponder some of its elements as certainties, this way or that. The purpose of life does not have any scientific meaning, but for one point which can’t be disputed: we are attached to it. All of use, but a few in extreme pain (physical or psychological).

“As far as we can tell… human life has absolutely no meaning”??? Why does Harari insists life has no meaning? “Purely scientific”? So occupiers can kill the occupied in peace?

***

Bill Gates read Harari and found him to his taste. The reason why will be unveiled. In both cases, to put it rather grossly, both life off the hog (Palestinians in one case, the world planet on the other). Here is Billy Boy:

“What gives our lives meaning? And what if one day, whatever gives us meaning went away—what would we do then?

I’m still thinking about those weighty questions after finishing Homo Deus, the provocative new book by Yuval Noah Harari.

Melinda and I loved Harari’s previous book, Sapiens, which tries to explain how our species came to dominate the Earth. It sparked conversations over our dinner table for weeks after we both read it…Harari’s new book is as challenging and readable as Sapiens…

Homo Deus argues that the principles that have organized society will undergo a huge shift in the 21st century… the things that have shaped society—what we measure ourselves by—have been some combination of religious rules about how to live a good life, and more earthly goals like getting rid of sickness, hunger, and war. We have organized to meet basic human needs: being happy, healthy, and in control of the environment around us. Taking these goals to their logical conclusion, Harari says humans are striving for “bliss, immortality, and divinity.”

What would the world be like if we actually achieved those things? This is not entirely idle speculation. War and violence are at historical lows and still declining. Advances in science and technology will help people live much longer and go a long way toward ending disease and hunger.

Here is Harari’s most provocative idea: As good as it sounds, achieving the dream of bliss, immortality, and divinity could be bad news for the human race. He foresees a potential future where a small number of elites upgrade themselves through biotechnology and genetic engineering, leaving the masses behind and creating the godlike species of the book’s title; where artificial intelligence “knows us better than we know ourselves”; and where these godlike elites and super-intelligent robots consider the rest of humanity to be superfluous…

He argues that humanity’s progress toward bliss, immortality, and divinity is bound to be unequal—some people will leap ahead, while many more are left behind. I agree that, as innovation accelerates, it doesn’t automatically benefit everyone. The private market in particular serves the needs of people with money and, left to its own devices, often misses the needs of the poor. But we can work to close that gap and reduce the time it takes for innovation to spread. For example, it used to take decades for lifesaving vaccines developed in the rich world to reach the poor. Now—thanks to efforts by pharmaceutical companies, foundations, and governments—there are cases where that lag time is less than a year. We should try to narrow the gap even more, but the larger point is clear: Inequity is not inevitable.

In addition, in my view, the robots-take-over scenario is not the most interesting one to think about. It is true that as artificial intelligence gets more powerful, we need to ensure that it serves humanity and not the other way around. But this is an engineering problem—what you could call the control problem. And there is not a lot to say about it, since the technology in question doesn’t exist yet.

I am more interested in what you might call the purpose problem. Assume we maintain control. What if we solved big problems like hunger and disease, and the world kept getting more peaceful: What purpose would humans have then? What challenges would we be inspired to solve?

In this version of the future, our biggest worry is not an attack by rebellious robots, but a lack of purpose.

What if a happy, healthy life was guaranteed for every child on Earth? How would that change the role parents play?

…Like every parent, I want my children to lead happy, healthy, fulfilling lives. But what if such a life was guaranteed for every child on Earth? How would that change the role parents play?

Harari does the best job I have seen of explaining the purpose problem. And he deserves credit for venturing an answer to it. He suggests that finding a new purpose requires us to develop new religion—using the word in a much broader sense than most people do, something like “organizing principles that direct our lives.”

Unfortunately, I wasn’t satisfied by his answer to the purpose question. (To be fair, I haven’t been satisfied by the answers I have seen from other smart thinkers like Ray Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, or by my own answers either.)…”

***

Common Purpose We Found: Oppress and, or Exterminate Them, Subhumans!

I was somewhat chuckling: Harari sees a future full of plutocracy and a situation strangely reminiscent of Israeli ruling over dozens of millions of enslaved Arabs. Gates sees a future where the poor’s pain will be alleviated, if not elevated, by the gifts of the plutocrats (if we “assume we maintain control”, an interesting Freudian slip…). And where purpose is found even though so many people have stopped suffering! (No more role for parents if everybody is happy and fulfilled; apparently!)   

***

Our Purpose: Survival, now clearly more challenging than ever:

Survive plutocracy, survive climate annihilation and general roasting of the biosphere, survive nuked tipped ICBMs from young cannibalistic maniacs, etc.

Looking at history of all civilizations, one can see that the number one danger is inequality, which affects both  mental and economic performance of a civilization. Inequality grows exponentially, and affects all dimensions of humanity. Inequality does not make the common people destitute, hungry and sick, it makes them stupid and immoral.

Exponential growth of inequality is the plutocratic effect, where an oligarchy, the government of a few, ends up ruling not just from wealth, but also from satanic means (thus the word “Pluto”; hence the notion of Pluto-power: Pluto-kratos). Time and time again, only a few brains end up doing all the thinking and ordering around, resulting not just in misery, but annihilation… Because a civilization where only a few think ends up completely stupid, and lacking purpose.

The “purpose” of the human species was always survival: survival of selves, survival of others we hold dear, survival of what we are attached to. There is no reason for this to change. Actually, with a quick march to ten billion humans, plenty of states making nuke in their basement thanks to laser enrichment, rising seas, runaway greenhouse (soon!), dying plankton, encroaching deserts, etc. survival will pretty much suddenly come back on the front burner.

The ilk of Steven Pinker, supported by ephemeral statistics, claim we have reached a new age of peace. However two things: we have a world oligarchy in place from control by the Permanent Members of the Security Council. That works as long as those don’t fight each other.

2)Moreover, such ages of self-satisfaction are always those of silly minds who go explore the seabed on foot, while the tsunami is gathering strength over their horizon. The more violent the catastrophe, the greater the calm before it strikes, precisely because those who could have done something to prepare and avoid it, were bathing in self-satisfaction.

***

“Final Phase of Showdown”:

Donald Trump, made a discourse in Poland which mentioned the occupation of Poland by the Nazis and the Soviets, which brought the massacre of six millions at least, 20% of the Polish population, Trump mentioned the collaboration between Nazis and Soviets to massacre Poles: he mentioned the full stop of the Red Army in the suburbs of Warsaw, waiting for moths that the Nazis had finished massacring the Polish population of the capital. (Actually the collaboration between Nazis and Soviets was decades old,m and culminated in the Treaty of 1939, made public to try to prevent France, followed by Britain, to declare war to Hitler…)

“As the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the west ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail,” Trump said. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” he said. “Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”

The US president, in his sharpest criticism of Moscow since taking office, urged Russia to “cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine and elsewhere and its support for hostile regimes, including Syria and Iran,” and asserting that it must “instead join the community of responsible nations in our fight against common enemies and in defense of civilization itself.”

Defending civilization? An answer was provided by the US Islamist Linda Sarsour, a famous US pseudo-feminist who called a Jihad against Trump in the name of “our beloved Muhammad“. Another was provided by the cannibal leading North Korea, as he successfully fired North Korea’s first ICBM (InterContinental Ballistic Missile).  I call him a cannibal, as Kim provides dogs with his enemies, and benefactors. As food.  Alive.

Official accounts had young cannibal Kim “feasting his eyes” on the ICBM. No doubt the perspective of millions burned wet his appetite“With a broad smile on his face,” he urged scientists to send more “big and small ‘gift packages’” to the Americans, in time for Independence Day, according to North Korea state press. Kim was quoted as saying that the “protracted showdown with the U.S. imperialists has reached its final phase.”

Senior U.S. and South Korean military officials warned that North Korea’s actions threatened peace. “Self-restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war,” Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, and Gen. Lee Sun-jin, chairman of the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a statement.

On a slightly less grim note, let’s observe that Harari teaches in Jerusalem, at the Hebrew University. In this particular context, the claim that humanity is threatened with bliss, immortality, and divinity will make at least half of the population sneer in dismay, not to say hatred. Some may well argue this is all a red herring, while the West Bank get progressively colonized, and the problem of Israeli Arabs, not solved…

In any case, the problems we have to solve quickly have never been so great, in the history of advanced life. Advanced life is going through one of its three worst mass extinctions. Arguably, advanced life is facing the worst mass extinction, ever: projections on CO2 rise and temperature rises are, potentially the largest, ever, since there are vertebrates and they wiggle.

Exciting and increasingly hot times…

Patrice Ayme’.