Islam, An Ideology of Murder Respected by Degenerates

Two attacks and one explosion in Catalonia last night, with deaths in Barcelona, Cambril, and Alcanar. There are at least 19 dead, and more than one hundred injured (including 17 French citizens in “urgence absolue”, that is extreme critical care). The attacks were claimed by the Islamist State. Apparently they were Moroccans. The next day, it was the turn of Finland.

A 18 year old “asylum seeking” Moroccan attempted to, and killed women. At least two Finnish women died, half a dozen others were stabbed. A few days later, it was the turn of Marseille, France, where a truck driver wounded and killed a number of people at bus stops. The cause of all this murdering, attempted and realized? The mythology of Fundamental Islam, or, more precisely, the respect it has enjoyed all too long, among civilized people.

Much could have been killed in Catalonia, if not for a single Catalan police woman who shot to death no less than FOUR drugged out Jihadists. In France the number of radicalized, dangerous known Jihadists, went from 13,000 to 18,500 (latest number, August 2017).

My nephew has close “Muslim” friends. At my urging, over the years, he recently read some of the Qur’an. He told me that the first impression is that “le Coran a été écrit par un fou” (the Qur’an was written by a madman).

Here we have a book which wants to “throw people into the fire”, every other page (the Bible does this more rarely).

As Surah 4, verse 56 has it, and this is the Muslim God allegedly speaking:

“Indeed, those who disbelieve in Our verses – We will drive them into a Fire. Every time their skins are roasted through We will replace them with other skins so they may taste the punishment. Indeed, Allah is ever Exalted in Might and Wise.”

Well, F your verses, Mr. God! Hopefully, we will grow thick enough a skin, one of these days. Western politicians go around, wondering how come so many Muslims get “radicalized”. Maybe they don’t how to read? “Radical” means from the root. Here we show some of the roots of Islam, they are vicious, by normal, decent, human standards.

The Qur’an is not just full of lethal threats, but also of rather funny insults.

So you want to end “terrorism”? End the literal preaching of this kind of hateful, lethal garbage.

And, especially stop telling us that throwing a critical look at this sort of lethal garbage is “racist”. Because all you will do, in the end, is to tell normal people that they are “racist” (the sort of reaction which brought the election of Trump, let alone the rule of plutocratic fascist rule which preceded it).

In Tunisia, a woman inherits only half of what a man inherits, and a Tunisian woman can’t marry a non-Muslim. And supposedly Tunisia is NOT an Islamist Republic. The 90-year-old Tunisian president want to change this anti-equality laws, but he is isolated, hated by the Jihadists, young and furious. Change requires physical courage. The chief of Islam in Tunisia came forward to support the president: no doubt he is high on the Jihadists’ list.

The “antifa” rage at the KKK and Neonazis, who are nowhere in power. Why don’t the “antifa” not rage at theocratic fascism? Instead some of the loudest of the opposition to Trump is theocratic fascist. Consider Linda Sarsour, who called for a “Jihad” against Trump.

Why did most “Western” “intellectuals” embrace (the respect of) Islam?

Because they were trying to please those who have the oil. Hint: not just the Saudis. We are enjoying the “Great Bitter Lake” conspiracy.   The Justice System followed: it gave right of asylum to Jihad criminals condemned to death in their own countries. That was confusing fascists and victims: laws which were made to accept genuine victims of fascism were turned into laws to protect the fascists themselves!

To fight Islam, in its fundamental version, one needs first to withdraw the respect it enjoys.

Withdrawing respect can, and should be, withdrawn to many infamous ideologies. This is the first step in fighting them. Know them, and then, when you know them well, and because you know them well, spite them.

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

HUMANISM: When TOP PREDATORS NEED LOVE

 

Yes, human beings, those top predators, need love. They do. But love is not all they need: there is no contradiction whatsoever, between being a predator and being loving. Lots of predators are loving. It’s actually the exact opposite: love generate the Dark Side. Humans can’t exist without love. But humans, even on their very best behavior, are not all about love, this is what traditional humanism thoroughly missed (although Caesar, Machiavel, Hobbes, Sade wrote a bit about the subject; Christianism acknowledges the Dark Side, just to excoriate it).

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WE, HUMANS, DON’T JUST PREDATE, WE ARE PREDATORS. Why and What.

We, humans, are actually the top predators. We are greater predators than any other predators which ever existed. This is a simple fact, which changes all of the past’s wishful thinking. Predation defines us. Predation, received and inflicted, made us human, in the last five million years. This changes everything. 

We are also the most intelligent animals. Predation and intelligence are related.

We evolved by, for, from, predation. Predation provided hominids with high nutritional content, lots of concentrated energy. Eating meat THEN enabled to grow big brains. Such is the philosophical order of things, and it rules neurology. This is not a fancy elucubration: we have the fossils to prove it.

For millions of years, hominids learned to stand up, and evolved the genetics to roam around on two legs. At the time, hominids grabbed meat here and there, a task which probably involved quite a bit of scary scavenging. That tended to modify jaws and teeth, while hominids became ever more carnivorous. Finally the brains grew, and grew and grew, fueled by ever more meat, the most energy rich power source around.

The chronology of hominid fossils reveals the causal relationships. And it may well be a universal law valid in exoplanets: carnivores may well be, all over the galaxy, the brainiest. Most brainiest animals on Earth are carnivorous (with the exception of elephants and parrots; in particular all great apes are dedicated carnivores, even gorillas and Orangutans.) It takes a brainiac to catch fishes, as Humpback Whales and many species of dolphins, all the way to Killer Whales, testify… 

Some want to forget our creator, millions of years of predatory evolution. Call that basic denial of one’s own reality!    

Homo Ergaster, the most primitive type of Homo Erectus known (2017). From Georgia, 1.8 million years ago. Five Homo Ergaster corpses were found in underground dens of saber tooth felids, were they were dragged to be consumed. Humans are the realistic animals, realism having been learned one grisly lesson at a time! Humans could only think at the time, that the predation problem had to be mitigated. We have the opposite problem!

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By destroying predators, we have been trying to dispose of the concept of predator, in a sort of final solution to our own nature, hell-bent to destroy and devastate the concept of humanity. A final solution exterminating what we are. How can that be? Why to self-destroy? Because denying our nature, to the point of not living according to it, profits the Elite, the Oligarchy, those among us who predate and think, and feel, accordingly.

How is this at all possible? Precisely from the spirit of predation. Human predation controls itself. It has evolved to do so, the survival of the species depended upon it. It’s its own meta feedback. Thus humanity instinctively devours humanity (and, historically, literally so!)

Hence when North Korea Kim, Japan Hirohito, Germany Adolf Hitler, engaged in confrontations they could only lose, they obey, modern weapons in hand, the oldest instinct: destroying humanity, lest there is too much of it, literally, or figuratively! This is why “reason” in a smaller context, can’t have any grip on them: their call is much greater than that! Asking them to not destroy, is asking them, not to do what motivates them, deep inside.

Human beings have been at the very top of the predation order, for millions of years. As early as Homo Habilis. That’s how humans survived in plains, steppe, desert and savannah, far from the trees. There was no refuge, except for the respect, not to say the terror, and certainly the worry, that human beings inflicted upon other beasts.

Masai children, ten-year old, can walk among the ferocious beasts, because the ferocious beasts fear human beings. I experienced and practiced the same, a little bit, at the same age, in Africa. Seeing an enormous lion communicate respect, as one respects back, is awe-inspiring. Then one knows intelligence rules, not just humans, but the beasts, the universe.

By rejecting the concept of predator and predation, thus, ourselves, recent “civilization” has been trying to reject our souls and our reality. Fanatical Pacifists will say:”Very well! High time! We have progressed! Alleluia” As if rejecting reality massively was progressive.

No, indeed. Fanatical Pacifists have not understood the most important thing: with their obsessive pacifism, they made themselves into ectoplasms lower than even sheep.

Pacifists, those admirable souls? Lower than sheep? Yes, indeed. Because, indeed, sheep themselves have a dignity, a courage, moral standards, and stand for themselves. Because indeed sheep, as a result, are not that pacific. In general, herbivores can be rather aggressive: horns and the like are not there by accident (I have had wild sheep, Ibex, pushing stones on me and others, from up high, deliberately, many times; But for a helmet, once, my spouse would have been killed, by an Ibex sent stone; also once a gigantic sheep, approaching me with a stupid, benign, absent-minded look on its face, then proceeded to push the unsuspecting me off the mountain with its sheer mass…Ever since I have known sheep can be Machiavellian).

Large predators should be reintroduced  everywhere outside of cities, and a few parks. Even in Europe. Large predators, by the way, are not the potentially most lethal: herbivores can be more of a problem. Elephants are the most dangerous beasts in Africa, followed by buffaloes (I was charged once by a cow). The key with elephants is to go up wind, and stay as far away as possible from the irascible, vengeful pachyderms with their enormously resentful large brains. All Maasai children know this.

Let’s reintroduce the entire megafauna, de-extincting species as needed (using latest genetics). Yes, megafauna will be frightening. That’s not a defect, but an advantage. Yes, it will mean we have to learn to instill respect, and make ourselves, respectful for the laws of nature, and the laws of the jungle.

By reintroducing megafauna, we will not just recover ecological balance for the planet, but mental balance, for ourselves.  

Be all we can be, and evolution meant us to be.

In particular, stop looking up at few other individuals, our leaders, as if they were gods, as if it were natural that they be our masters, with enormous powers when we have very little. No, they are not our leaders, we humans, the top predators are not meant to be led. Let’s learn that about ourselves.

Having leaders with their fingers on thermonuclear fire, fed and promoted by bankers, is not natural. Having leaders, except in a baboon troop sized organization, is not natural. It’s not a natural form of human organization. It’s not a natural form of ecology. We have organized an unnatural order of things, and conditioned ourselves to expect, and respect it. Thus the biosphere is going down the drain. Unimaginable wars are getting prepared: watch a few dictators’ antics (Venezuela’s Maduro, and the thoroughly hell-bent North Korean Kim, who affects to believe there are enough rabid pacifists around to make his thermonuclear blackmail, real cool and effective, an awe-inspiring key to a great future!)

Time to rebel. Time to rebel against an order which has imposed on us, chains and masters, because this order of  thoughts and… orders is rushing to catastrophe. Time to recover, to rebuild, a planetary environment which makes sense, and thus gives us sense, far from Absurdism. This the only planetary engineering worth having.

We are made to experience the megafauna, to be ourselves, in full. We can’t fully mentally function without that spur of evil intelligence, potentially observing and evaluating us. In particular, the laws of the jungle teach us the ever-present importance of truth, and realism.  Yet, remember: predation, received and inflicted, made us human, in the last five million years. When looking at human society, think:’This is what top predators organized.’ And how come we let it be? Are we what we are supposed to be?

How could we fix the world, the world we are destroying, if we are not fully ourselves? And how could we be ourselves if nature’s awe can’t educate and inspire us? Let’s reintroduce an environment which inspires us and teaches us respects for the laws of nature. Being able to experience living with megafauna is central to that.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Those Who Don’t Meditate Don’t Creatively Think

 

Thus meditation is at the core what it means to be human, let alone civilized.

This being said, there are many ways of meditating. Many  more ways than is usually considered, or believed.

The root of the word meditate, is the Proto Indo-European “med”: “taking appropriate measures”. Hence the Romans “meditari”, to reflect, consider, think it over.

The basic argument of some meditators is that they can put their mind in a different state, and logically and emotionally approach things anew. Calm and rest, slowing the heartbeat can do this. Right. It’s most appropriate, especially to hot heads. Those who tend towards road rage, ill-considered relationships, depression for shallow reason(s), drug, tobacco and THC addiction, abusing others, etc.

However, for more perfect, PC types, slowing one’s already supine mind will not bring mental perspective. The problem is the exact opposite to that of hot heads. The average, rather sedate and conformist Commons need to put their minds in different state(s) to reach greater perspectives, hence higher wisdom, through excitement, not anesthesia.

Hence violence and passion can lead to higher wisdom. Yes, they won’t slow down the heartbeat: that’s precisely the point. Indeed the human brain needs oxygen, nutrients, blood flow: the brain uses between 20%, 25% and 43% of a human oxygen… To try to change the brain by starving the brain of blood flow sounds more akin to hanging by the neck, than of conditions conducive to creative thinking.

Extreme situations can provide with extremely different perspectives, which, well interpreted, can provide with extreme wisdom as nothing else can.

For example, thinking about the same subject under very heavy exertion gives very different approaches and results than doing it half asleep in one’s bed as Leonardo Da Vinci, and quite a few other mathematicians or physicists have recommended to.

One can be swimming in the sea, and watch a giant shark pass by, and this will put oneself in a very different mental state. Irreversibly, most probably. I was personally caught in a giant rock avalanche, the largest rock avalanche I have ever seen, even on TV, and miraculously survived (meaning I won’t believe the story if someone told it to me). That changed me very deeply (not just the avalanche itself, but the near impossible survival)   

Actually, putting one in a completely different meditative state is the main advantage of extreme sports, and why they capture their practitioners so well. (Contemplate me!)

Enthusiasts sitting in a room, with high ceilings and a gong, can talk about approaching meditation through measured breathing all they want. Diving so deep in the sea, with just one’s lungs, so deep only the sandy bottom of the sea shines, FORCES one to master one’s breathing (and heart, and peripheral body, and brain). Meditate, or die. What could be more motivating, more thorough?

A human brain is a marvellous thing. Pain is generally experienced only when it’s profitable to do so, in light of the overwhelming necessity of survival of self, or significant other(s). The French solo sailor Alain Colas once calmly operated his giant sailboat with a nearly sectioned foot. He didn’t experience disabling pain (until he was in a safe situation). I experienced several torn tendons and two fractures on May 11. After the event, I calmly jerked back a finger which was out of its articulation. I learned that in B movies, but it worked. Then I started running again, as rescue was distinctly not on the mountain. I knew the pain was manageable if I got into action answering the situation. I did the same (on the same mountain!) when I was stung by more than 40 wasps.

The best, or at least the deepest, way to be reminded how powerful, and correct, the human mind can be, is to go extreme. Sitting in a lotus position without moving a neuron, won’t do it. Confronting the world will. It will not necessarily make you look, or sound, nice. But it will make you wise and good deep down inside.

Generally nastiness comes from sectarianism, and that, in turn, provides with comforts which, wisdom shows, should be denied.

Patrice Ayme’

Humanism Versus Buddhism

The very fact that there is a distinction to be made between, “Humanism” and “Buddhism” tells volumes. No ideology with pretensions to goodness should stand distinct from humanism. Because that means, contradicting human ethology. And Buddhism contradicts human ethology, big time. Arguably, it’s way worse than Abrahamism: even the disguised cannibalism of Abrahamism is more naturally anchored in human nature.

What’s the problem in not been occurred in human nature? Well, the more so, arguably, the more of a superstition: standing (“stare”) above (“super”) reality.

Another problem with Buddhism is that it was instigated by a Prince, Gautama Buddha. I am not a Prince, nor do I know any, but I suspect that any Prince would be partial to making the Commons into sheep. So that they can be directed where the shepherds of men when men to be led (to slaughter, or, at the very least, to be shorn and milked, as needed). The fact is, Buddhism instills passivity: passivity is perfect for Princes. Passivity is not a good propellant for evolution. Individuals are created as children, it’s very hard for them to quit their mental geometry later.

The next problem with Buddhism, as with Islamism and Christianism, is that there are many variants of this superstition. In particular, they are more or less superstitious. Tibetan Buddhism, which is extremely superstitious, is pretty far from Zen Buddhism, which is pretty secular. 

Tibetan Buddhists believe that if they rotate around unclimbed Mount Kailash, good things will happen. The PRC gave famed alpinist Reinhold Messner the authorization to climb it, but he declined… Good boy.

Variants of Buddhism are just as far from each other as Wahhabism/Salafism is far from Sufism (the latter having itself drastically different variants). The Mahāyāna (“Great Vehicle) Buddhism is the largest major tradition of Buddhism existing today, with 53.2% of practitioners, compared to 35.8% for Theravada and 5.7% for Vajrayana. The Great Vehicle is more altruistic: it may have been Christianized (personal opinion), as Christian missions reached Sri Lanka as early as the Third Century, and India by the 100s, Common era (just when Mahāyāna surfaced). (I have lots of idiosyncratic opinions…)

Just to give an example, Tibetan Buddhism comprises four lineages. Temperaments can run high: top associates of the Dalai Lama killed each other for reasons of great theological import, in the obscure spiritual caves they roam.  (Interestingly, I made a Google Search of this fact I know to be true; however, Google informed me that, under European Privacy Law, this search was omitted:I’m now in Europe…It took me a huge amount of time to find the link above, and I had to be crafty. This shows European law to be friendly to the Elite, AKA plutocracy…)  

The fundamental problem with Buddhism is its very secular foundation. The deepest intuition of Buddhism, that pain has to be avoided, at the cost of perception. It is as inhuman as it gets.

Some may object to this description. And the objection may be valid, depending upon the variant of Buddhism considered. Some Buddhists will say:”Pain has to be avoided, at the cost of most human emotion”. That’s still inhuman.

Why? The brain thinks, not just with strict implications, but also with emotions. This is even true at the level of pure logic. Emotions can’t be avoided, even if one restricts oneself to logic itself.

Even the parodic character in Star Trek, Mr. Spock, depends very heavily on emotions: after all, one has to have FAITH in the axioms of logic. Besides logics can be anything, by changing the axioms. One choses axioms of logic from emotion, not logic. Logic does not select logic. Logic is; volition, volition from emotion, does the rest.

Emotional computers are coming, make no mistake. Serious Quantum Computers will be emotional… (Yes, I know, that could be a problem…)

By then, when it becomes obvious that, for achieving true Artificial Intelligence, one needs emotions, Buddhism will suffer an irretrievable blow.

Many Buddhists say:”Wait, meditation is good, it changes the brain”. Right. No need to be a Buddhist to meditate, though. I meditate several hours a day, I am a meditation machine, but I usually never mention it, it’s a s natural to me as breathing, and I know the of the impudence of telling other people to “meditate”, as if they were such fools that they never meditate. Basically, if one never meditates, one is just a mechanical parrot. Because one has no indigenous thinking.

Moreover, to deflate further the Buddhist bandwagon, Buddhist meditation is only one type of meditation. However admirable. There are other types of meditation, fully incompatible with Buddhist meditation, and which give excellent results Buddhism can’t get at. An example is Taoist meditation.

Make no mistake: I welcome individuals with dubious behavior to engage in so-called secular Buddhism, if they didn’t gather such a level of wisdom yet, that they still insist to engage in road rage, drug abuse, drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco or THC, insulting their friends thoughtlessly, betraying their loving ones, clutching guns, potentially lethal behaviors, abusing the innocent, in being self-destructive, or in total incapacity to meditate in any way, etc.

I will just say that philosophy, full force, is vastly superior to Buddhism and other isms. Philosophy itself has its own isms, many of them. To quote a few: Stoicism, Cynicism, Existentialism, Marxism, Nominalism, Epicureanism, Positivism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Hedonism, Realism, Pragmatism, Materialism, etc.

Allright, the Politically Correct pseudo-left which rules, or, more exactly, ruins the West loves the Dalai Lama certainly the most famous incarnation of Buddhism known worldwide. I am cool with some of what Dalai says, but I have been known to agree even with Lamas in the high Andes. However, my harsh criticism of Buddhism, and other eastern religions (I barely got started here) was pleased to see that, last time my friend Obama received the DL at the White House, His Holiness had to skirt the garbage of the backside…

However interesting the debate, “Secular Buddhism” is pretty much an oxymoron. The mood of passivity Buddhism and its derivatives generated made East Asia fall behind West Asia (Europe). Now, of course, Buddhism and its derivatives or antecedents (Confucianism) has been wiped out as a leading mood, in places such as Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. It has been replaced by the mood which enabled Western Europe to forcefully industrialize in the Nineteenth Century (If Czar Peter The Great read this, he would be outraged and point out that, three centuries ago, he did exactly what Mao, Chou En Lai and Deng Tsiao Ping did, in the last few decades… Right, I present my excuses…) The point is that PROGRESSIVISM is not compatible with Buddhism. All leaders in the East have concluded it’s not, and they have chosen the philosophical path forged by Europe (and now idiotically second-guessed there!)

Too many superstitious religions around, for this small planet. Respecting them, amounts to procreating them. We need hard-core secularism, and the religion of the planetary Republic.

Patrice Ayme’

Lessons From Sparta, Thebes, Athens, Macedonia, Rome, Greece, Franks, On How To Beat the Dark Side (In North Korea)

Countless intellectuals, for example Salman Rushdie, hold that the those Sanders supporters who didn’t vote for Clinton are contemptible idiots. But then he admits that, when Trump was elected, he realized he didn’t understand the USA. Verily, Rushdie didn’t understand the most important thing. He reminds me of a parallel universe with Jews advocating voting for Himmler instead of Hitler.

Rushdie claims the “left” is obsessed with purity. And he rightly points at Socialists, Communists, Marxists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, Maoists. Whatever: the same can be said of the extreme right, Nazis, Fascists, etc… Or even the center (that’s why there is no center in the United Kingdom).

In a French philosophical magazine, Rushdie claims that “we have entered the era of the impossible”. Little does he seem to know. The impossible made history countless times.

Part of the Famous Chigi Vase, Showing Hoplites In Formation. Complete With Musician. Upon Hoplites, Freedom Rested. Similarly, Constant War Made the Italian Renaissance, Starting With the Florence Republic Issuing Bonds To Pay for Its Army (killed centuries later by Medici plutocracy).

Actually, Rushdie understands nothing in exactly the same way as Trump, Macron, the Clintons and Obama didn’t understand anything most important: people have had enough of the inequality which is degrading civilization.

When asked why he didn’t reveal his work on (Gaussian) curvature, the tremendous mathematician Friedrich Gauss sneered in a letter to Bessel in 1829, that:”It may take very long before I make public my investigations on this issue: in fact, this may not happen in my lifetime for I fear the “clamor of the Boeotians.””

Boeotia was the city state, capital Thebes, north of Attica. Athenians viewed it as dull, insipid and brutish. They shouldn’t have. With crucial Athenian military help, Thebes destroyed Spartan supremacy forever by freeing the lands, and at least one city-state, that it had enslaved, for centuries. Sparta’s downfall was propelled by the same mood which had brought its war against Athens 80 years prior. Namely, obstinately taking itself for a superpower, and imposing that at all cost (a bit the same as Putin’s Russia nowadays; Sparta was also led by a charismatic king, Agesilaus II, who stayed popular in his eighties, although Sparta was clearly going downhill, big time).

Later, though, Alexander burned Thebes to the ground, while Athens watched (that led to the eradication of democracy). Demosthenes had warned against the Macedonians. Recently I read a history book, just written, which claims that Demosthenes was the bad guy, as Athens should have submitted to Macedonia, more readily.

This is to forget that Athens did submit to Alexander, but not really Macedonia. Antipater took the succession of Alexander after the latter’s death. The resulting war between Antipater and Athens brought Macedonian victory and the establishment, by Antipater, of a plutocracy in Athens (only the richest could vote: destitute citizens, most of them, got deprived of their citizens’ rights).

The Theban army, around 36,000 men was roughly the size of Alexander’s. The battle was long uncertain, as Thebes fought with the energy of despair, knowing it faced annihilation. If the Athenian army had joined Thebes, the Macedonians would have been annihilated.

The Macedonians were intrinsically fascist, because of their way of life: plutocrats owned vast domains where horses were brought up, gold mines, etc. The Greeks to the south lived in cities, from more intellectual tasks, where ideas hence democracy were more productive. The opposition was total, it couldn’t be remedied: either the Macedonian brutes would conquer intellectual Greece, or Intellectual Greece would defeat the brutes. Because the Greeks didn’t act when they could, with the Macedonians as they had with the Persians, democracy and intelligence got defeated by the rule of malevolence (which is what “plutocracy” means). 

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The lesson for today’s world?

The military side of things should not be neglected. One battle can decide the world. Nor should the endurance of plutocracy, and the mind control it can exert. After Antipater submitted Athens, the mental subjugation was such that, to this day, people have forgotten all what democracy consists of. They came to call countries “led” by Obama, Trump, Macron, let alone Putin and the Queen of England, “democracies” Whereas those countries are parodies of what the ancient Greeks called “democracy”.

Contradictors would point out that Athens had only 80,000 citizens at most, with plenty of slaves and subjugated women.  However, the subjugation of women was a phenomenon specific to Athens, not to all Greek city-states (Spartan women personally owned much of Sparta, as Aristotle whined).  The fact that, at the height of her power, during the Fifth Century BCE, Athens was attacked by the greatest powers, first Achaemenid Persia, then Sparta, then Sparta allied with Achaemenid Persia, has a lot to do with it, in my opinion.

In this world war, fascism against democracy situation, Athens was first a military empire fighting for survival. When Athens sent an expedition to Egypt to free her mother civilization (yes, Egypt) from Persian subjugation, it was no time to ponder who deserved to be citizens or not (in its final struggle against Alexander, Thebes made her slaves citizens). Ultimately the Egyptian expedition failed, but it was another fracture in Persian armor (later to be exploited by Alexander).

So what to say of today? The entire world is reminiscent of Greece plus Macedonia. The “West” consists in a number of nations (including Japan). That would be the equivalent of the Delian league, headed by Athens.

Except that, nowadays, the world is militarily led by the USA while intellectually led by Europe. That was exactly the Greco-Roman arrangement which lasted for 1600 years, until it was replaced by a Franko-Greek arrangement by 800 CE, to Constantinople’s fury; however, while Rome was a always mental subset of Greece, with a superior fascist republic, the Franks came to dominate Constantinople in all ways, precisely because Constantinople versed into fanaticism, for much too long and too deep.

Indeed, as everybody knows, Constantinople, Oriental Rome, went down. In no small measure because, by the Eighth Century, the Franks looked down on Constantinople’s Christian fanaticism. Whereas all what Constantinople could see what that the savage Muslims below its walls were successful because precisely they were fanatically religious savages, so they duplicated that global mood.

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Conclusion: Debate and Think, in a Timely Manner. Change Moods:

Sparta’s failure to change its global mood in a timely manner led to its military and then demographic disappearance (the same fate threatens quite a few countries nowadays). Worse, Sparta nearly eradicated Athens, and certainly destroyed her remarkable mood of total inquiry, all azimuths. it would have been better to mimic Athens than try to destroy civilization.

Athens survived because, under Roman hegemony, Athens was the place of higher learning and higher wisdom. Centuries later, fanatical Christian emperors tried to shut down Athens by shutting down its schools. The result is that the Franks decided that the “translatio studii” had happened: Paris was the New Athens, a translation of studies had occurred, centred on Paris’ Cathedral (not the present Notre Dame, the one before; the change of cathedrals enabled the university to become physically independent).

Don’t forget that fascism and its version with a civilized veneer, plutocracy, are extremely sticky: we got overwhelmed by fascism and plutocracy, 24 centuries ago, and didn’t get out of it yet.

The “West”, whatever that is (is the People’s Republic of China in it, or not?) has to be broad and open-minded, yet military threats should be eliminated in a timely manner (that is, before they can become uncontrollable).

In the past, the mightiest empire (Rome, China, the Aztecs) fell to relatively small enemy forces (the Goths and Genghis Khan’s Mongols had no more than 200,000 warriors; subsequent German invasions were from much smaller numbers). Cortez conquered the Aztecs with less than 1500 men, and was repeatedly teased by the Aztecs that he could not make it, because of his tiny numbers. The Aztecs didn’t know that the Conquistadores were making shots with copper warheads for their crossbows, industrially, having recruited hundreds of thousands of natives to do so to their specifications.

Tiny enemies, like tiny rattlesnakes, are the more venomous, the smaller they are, precisely because their small size motivates them more. Thus, full severity with Muslim fanatics (Jihadists), is fully justified.  Same for North Korea, if it pursues its plans to nuclear blackmail the world (Athens didn’t wait for Persia to attack, doing nothing; first it armed itself to the teeth; thus, when Persia asked for submission, Athens had enough might to say no).   

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Kill Infamy While You Can:

Says The Economist, all too mildly in “How To Avoid Nuclear War With North Korea”:

“There are no good options to curb Kim Jong Un. But blundering into war would be the worst

IT IS odd that North Korea causes so much trouble. It is not exactly a superpower. Its economy is only a fiftieth as big as that of its democratic capitalist cousin, South Korea. Americans spend twice its total GDP on their pets. Yet Kim Jong Un’s backward little dictatorship has grabbed the attention of the whole world, and even of America’s president, with its nuclear brinkmanship. On July 28th it tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that could hit Los Angeles. Before long, it will be able to mount nuclear warheads on such missiles, as it already can on missiles aimed at South Korea and Japan. In charge of this terrifying arsenal is a man who was brought up as a demigod and cares nothing for human life—witness the innocents beaten to death with hammers in his gigantic gulag. Last week his foreign ministry vowed that if the regime’s “supreme dignity” is threatened, it will “pre-emptively annihilate” the countries that threaten it, with all means “including the nuclear ones”. Only a fool could fail to be alarmed.”

Odd? Why odd? China uses North Korea as a form of sophisticated blackmail, why Mr. Xi tries to push the other way, namely in the South China Sea (while all these tensions stoke nationalism, hence his rule). The Economist to weakly recommend to “contain” North Korea. Just as is already done. Hitler, too, was contained. Until it became clear to Britain and France that the best choice was to declare war. Next recommendation from The Economist: breathe deep and carry on.

And why does The Economist pretend that “blundering into war” is the worst. No. The “worst” would be nuclear blackmail as far as the eye can see. Within a few decades, the young Mr. Kim could have the ability to annihilate the “West” in its entirety. The obvious remark is that a war with North Korea, a cannibalistic mafia state, now, would probably not go nuclear. Wait, and it will. Nuclear War has a high probability NOT to be contained (a strike, or attempted strike, on a US city would probably mean annihilation of North Korea and all its allies, real or imagined).

***

IMPOSSIBLE IS ALL TOO OFTEN, NOT REAL:

The impossible made history countless times. One has to be ready for the impossible, that’s how to contain it. 

History beats fiction, anytime. Want to learn something drastic? Learn real history.  It’s never weak.

Patrice Ayme’

Relativistic Philosophy Beyond Consensus

It’s good to focus on “General Relativity” and Cosmology without the cloak of mathematics gone wild and unsupervised, indeed.

Anything having to do with “General Relativity” has a lot of extremely debatable philosophy hidden below a thick carpet of computations. Abuse of philosophically unsupervised spacetime leads one to believe in time machines, wormholes, and similar absurdities. A recent discovery such as Dark Energy (ever expanding space faster than previously anticipated), and a not so recent one, Dark Matter, show one has to be extremely careful.

Einstein equation of “General Relativity” (GR) is basically Curvature = Mass-Energy. Einstein long observed that the left hand side of the equation was built of mathematical beauty, and the right hand side of a murky mud of a mess. The discovery of Dark Matter proved him prophetic about that. (BTW, I know perfectly well that, stricto sensu, it’s the Ricci tensor, derived from the full Curvature tensor on the left…)

First a philosophical trap: “General Relativity” (GR) is a misnomer. It’s not clear what’s being generalized. GR is certainly a theory of the relationship between gravity and local space-times (the Theory of Relativity of space and time which Poincaré named that way in 1904).

Einstein was initially motivated to explain inertia according to the Newton-Mach observation that the distant stars seemed to endow matter with inertia (because if matter rotates relative to distant stars, a centrifugal force appears).

That way, he failed, as Kurt Goedel produced spacetime models which rotated wildly without local consequences. Frame dragging exists nevertheless, and is crucial to GPS. So GR has local consequences.

Neither Poincaré nor Einstein liked the concept of “spacetime”.

There are massive galaxy cluster, such as Abell 370 (shown here). They can be made up of thousands of Milky Way-sized galaxies. This is beyond anything we can presently have a feeling for. The space inside this cluster is not expanding, that’s a fact, but the space between this cluster and other, unbound, galaxies and clusters, is viewed by today’s Main Stream Cosmology, as expanding. I’m robustly skeptical. Image credit: NASA, ESA/Hubble, HST Frontier Fields.

A question has naturally come up: if space expands, how come we don’t? An answer to this has been the raisin bread model of the expanding universe.

As Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist in Quantum Gravity and High energy physics  puts it: “In cosmology, too, it helps to first clarify what it is we measure. We don’t measure the size of space between galaxies — how would we do that? We measure the light that comes from distant galaxies. And it turns out to be systematically red-shifted regardless of where we look. A simple way to describe this — a space-time slicing that makes calculations and interpretations easy — is that space between the galaxies expands.”

However, the entire area is contentious. The usual snap-back of haughty physicist keen to deny any brains worth noticing to the Commons, is to say that all those who don’t understand the mathematics at hand should shut up.

That’s a disingenuous answer, as NOBODY understands fully the mathematics at hand (those with snappy rejoinders know this, but they enjoy their power maliciously).

An example of the non-universality of the notion of expanding space is the following exact quote from Physics Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, author, among many other things, such as the Weinberg-Salam model of the electroweak interaction, of the most famous textbook on the subject, “Gravitation and Cosmology”: “…how is it possible for space, which is utterly empty, to expand? How can nothing expand? The answer is: space does not expand. Cosmologists sometimes talk about expanding space, but they should know better”

Well, they don’t.

Reference https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/raisin-bread-model-of-space-time.901290/

Personally, I think that both space and time are local concepts (as long as one does not add to consideration the Quantum theory, as it was created, post 1923, by De Broglie, and after 1924, by the Copenhagen School). Local space and local time are united by the speed of light, c, through naturally ubiquitous light clocks. Space and time are measured locally (although Poincaré proposed a slow motion to move synchronized clocks around, and Einstein copied and published that mechanism, verbatim, as he had with E = m c²).

It has been proposed that the redshift of cosmological photons, and its attribution, 100%, to the expansion of spacetime, is a proof of the expanding “spacetime”. One must say that this statement is the core of present cosmology. And anybody looking down on the idea will not be viewed as serious by famous physicists. However just saying something does not prove it. Especially when the conclusion seems to be the hypothesis.

Lorentz- Poincaré Local Space and Time theory was experimentally provable (electromagnetism proved it).

But where is the proof that the universe is like an expanding dough, spacetime, with galactic raisin grains in it? Just waving the notion that the atomic force is 10⁴⁰ the gravitation force at a small scale does not seem compelling to me. It’s rather a question of range: gravitation is much longer range, although, much weaker. Thus the geodesic deviations due to gravitation show up at a very great distance, whereas those due to atomic and molecular force cause enormous geodesic deviations, but only at very short range. We are these enormous local deviations, larger by 10⁴⁰ locally.

Yet, even this more precise argument smacks of hand waving.  Why? Because a theory of local forces as curvatures, although posited by Riemann in 1865, and the foundation of GR, still does not exist (that’s one thing string theory was trying to achieve, and failed). Gravitation remains the only force that is tautologically equivalent to a curved space theory.

Quantum Physics has provided that theoretical spacetime with a nonlocal causal architecture (through Quantum Entanglement). However that “causality” although geometric, is non metric (and thus manifests itself with no geodesic deviation, no force).

Einstein, after a debate on nonlocality imparted by the Quantum, with the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, attracted the world’s attention on that problem in 1935, with his famous EPR paper. There Einstein denounced the way the “spooky action at a distance” affected distant “elements of reality”. Since then, the spookiness at a distance has been amply confirmed (and enables to encrypt space communications while knowing 100% whether they have been breached, as a Chinese satellite recently showed). Nonlocal effects show unambiguously that the metric (of “spacetime”) does not capture all the geometry (an notion which may surprise physicists, but not those mathematicians who have studied the foundations of their field).

This Quantum architecture has led, so far, to no prophecy, let alone theory, by established physicist. Entangled Quantum architecture is actually not part of the General Relativistic raisin cake model (or any GR model). However, I will venture to say one can view it as predicting Dark matter, at the very least. It’s just a question of baking something more sophisticated than raisin bread.

Patrice Ayme

Ctenophora Rewriting 750 Million Years Of Neural Evolution

Ctenophora were long considered just a kind of jellyfish. Turns out that was a gross mistake. Indeed a Russian immigrant to the USA, Leonid Moroz, found that these animals were unrelated to jellyfish. In fact, ctenophora are so profoundly different from any other animal on Earth, that it has been discovered they are much older, and unrelated, to sponges (previously sponges were thought to be by far the oldest animals; now this is known to be wrong).

In 1995, Moroz tested the nerve cells of ctenophora for the neurotransmitters serotonin, dopamine and nitric oxide, chemical messengers considered the universal instruments of the neural language of all and any animals. He didn’t find any of them.

Ctenophora were already known for having a serious nervous system, complete with neurons; but these first experiments by Moroz showed that ctenophora nerves are built from molecular building blocks – different from any other animal – using ‘a different chemical language’! says Moroz: he calls these animals ‘aliens of the sea’.

If vertebrates had not appeared, 200 million years after ctenophora, probably confining the latter into an ecological niche, civilization may have evolved from ctenophora.

An obscure force seems to compel the apparition of complex nervous systems to evolve. It is universal – not just on Earth, but also on inhabited exoplanets. And I will show roughly what it is, and where it comes from in a companion essay (to which this one is introductory).

Jellyfishes use muscles to flap their bodies and swim. Whereas ctenophora use thousands of cilia to swim. They can be very small, but the largest are 1.5 meter long (5 feet). Jellyfishes sting, ctenophora capture prey using two sticky tentacles that secrete glue. Ctenophora ambush their prey.  

Studies of ctenophora, starting 130 years ago, showed neuron masses, and, more recently, what looked like synapses. 

Ctenophore. It looks as if the ancestors of vertebrates MUSCLED out (serious pun intended!) the ctenophora. With sheer muscle power the cilia smarts ctenophora were thrown into a niche!

Moroz finally was able to make a “transcriptome” of the DNA of ctenophora in 2007.   5,000 or 6,000 gene sequences were actively turned on in the animal’s nerve cells. His team showed that Pleurobrachia lacked the genes and enzymes required to manufacture neurotransmitters seen in other animals. These missing neurotransmitters included the ones that Moroz found to be absent back in 1995 – serotonin, dopamine and nitric oxide – but also acetylcholine, octopamine, noradrenaline, etc. Ctenophora also lacked genes for receptors that to respond to conventional neurotransmitters.

As Moroz team put it in Nature:

“The origins of neural systems remain unresolved. In contrast to other basal metazoans, ctenophores (comb jellies) have both complex nervous and mesoderm-derived muscular systems. These holoplanktonic predators also have sophisticated ciliated locomotion, behaviour and distinct development. Here we present the draft genome of ten… ctenophore transcriptomes, and show that they are remarkably distinct from other animal genomes in their content of neurogenic, immune and developmental genes. Our integrative analyses place Ctenophora as the earliest lineage within Metazoa. This hypothesis is supported by comparative analysis of multiple gene families, including the apparent absence of HOX genes, canonical microRNA machinery, and reduced immune complement in ctenophores. Although two distinct nervous systems are well recognized in ctenophores, many bilaterian neuron-specific genes and genes of ‘classical’ neurotransmitter pathways either are absent or, if present, are not expressed in neurons. Our metabolomic and physiological data are consistent with the hypothesis that ctenophore neural systems, and possibly muscle specification, evolved independently from those in other animals.”

[Nature, June 2014. The ctenophore genome and the evolutionary origins of neural systems]

Further studies have confirmed that ctenophora have evolved earlier, and completely independently of other animals.

Ctenophora lack entire classes of genes that had been thought to be universal to all animals. These included so-called micro-RNA genes, which help to form specialised cell types in organs, and HOX genes, which divide bodies into separate parts, be it the segmented body of a worm or lobster, or the segmented spine and finger bones of a vertebrate.  Such genes are present in simple sponges and placozoa.

Ctenophora are the oldest type of animal known! (Moroz tried to publish a paper in 2009 which implicitly led to that conclusion; it was rejected. He then did more refined studies which led to the 2014 Nature paper.)

Moroz now counts up to 12 independent evolutionary origins of the nervous system. Including at least one in cnidaria (the group that includes jellyfish and anemones), three in echinoderms (the group that includes sea stars, sea lilies, urchins and sand dollars), one in arthropods (the group that includes insects, spiders and crustaceans), one in molluscs (the group that includes clams, snails, squid and octopuses), one in vertebrates – and now, at least one in ctenophora.

“There is more than one way to make a neuron, more than one way to make a brain,” says Moroz. In each of these evolutionary branches, different genes and proteins ensembles got elected through random gene mutations, to take part in building a nervous system. The details are completely different, yet, the big picture is the same!

And that’s no accident, as I will argue, there is an underlying Quantum force pushing towards intelligence… Thus Lamarck was right.

Moroz rejected much of what he was taught. Because his ‘initial hypothesis was exactly what was in the textbooks’, moving to the correct way of thinking about ctenophora took him 20 years.

Science is truth, but truth is not obvious. And searching for it is even more demanding.

Patrice Ayme’

TRUTH IS WHAT WORKS

Debating what “Truth” means is not new, and has been a very hot subject not just in the Twelfth Century Paris’ Cathedral School/University (when the great philosopher Abelard fiercely, at the risk of his life, opposed Saint Bernard about launching a Second Crusade).

Some of the greatest names in philosophy and foundations of physics  or logics of the Twentieth Century have thrived in questioning the notion of truth (Karl Popper, Einstein, Heisenberg, Jules Henri Poincaré,  for physics; Alfred Tarski, Carnap, Russell, Robinson, and many others, for logics).

As usual, just as Nietzsche made philosophy with a hammer, I deconstruct it with an H-bomb (melting all these hammers in the process). My conception of truth is simple, I have no time to twist truth is all direction, in the hope of being tolerated by all and ideologies. Why would be clear by the end of the essay (where the venom is located, as in the scorpion’s tail).

I will try to approach the truth about truth, by answering some of the comments of Eugen R, a dedicated commenter on this site, in the hope some would have similar position. I know plenty well enough that postmodernism basically asserted there was no truth (that makes Foucault’s .

***

Eugen: Science is just an instrument, how can be an instrument truth or false?

Answer: Science is what humans do. “Science” comes from the Latin for “to know”. One may then ask what “knowing” is. “Knowing” is what can be checked experimentally. Many animals use tools. Chimps who break hard nuts with stones are practicing science. They know that the stone will enable to extract the delicious innards.

Notice in passing that all advanced animals have culture: they transmit science to fellow creatures: it’s unlikely that chimpanzees,, or gorillas learn their entire pharmacopeia of plants they know (more than 50) by the experimental method (especially as some plants can be deadly). Transmitting science can be viewed as the definition of both culture and “advanced”.

Eugen: “Is science about finding out the truth”. The answer is no. Science is about to try to understand the non-understandable.

Answer: Well, scientific RESEARCH is about to try to understand what’s not understood. An attempt to stand-under. For example, there is NO science of Sub Quantum Reality. Not yet. But there are attempts to elaborate some (String Theory, Supersymmetry, SQPR: Sub Quantum Patrice Reality).

If you told a prehistoric man that Earth is round, like a ball, he would have asked what a ball is. So one would have had first to make him understand what a ball is. To understand the shape of the Earth, one needs to have a modicum of mathematics most two years old have now, but prehistoric man didn’t.

Eugen: Science also limits itself only to the natural phenomena, that can be experimentally observed.

Answer: Ex-per means out (ex) trying (per, a Proto Indo-European root). There are three ways to acquire knowledge: experimentation, culture and… FAITH (here we come!)

Some will be stupefied by the preceding. Faith??? What has faith to do with it? Everything: everybody climbing up into an aeroplane, has faith. Faith in thousands of engineers, mechanics, the laws of physics, and the pilots. Faith is what anchors knowledge into certainty (take that, Jihadists and priests).

Therein a hierarchy: because both culture and faith ultimately depend upon experiments.

Science, as a body of knowledge, not as a method, is a set of logics each unifying bodies of experiments each defining elements of TRUTH(s).

That definition also fits mathematics itself (mathematicians experiment with baby examples, and then write overarching theories unifying those baby examples; an example is that the definition of curvature for sphere, thought of in general enough a fashion, provides with a definition for the curvature for a saddle)

***

Eugen: As science advances with its understanding of the reality, and developing new sophisticated instruments, like the Hadron Collider, which is in a way extension of our limited human senses, it slowly pushes the limits of what is field of scientific research and what is not. For example the phenomena of life and consciousness were taboo for scientific research until recently.

Answer: Entirely true. For example Galileo’s X30 magnification telescope enabled to observe mountains on the moon and four satellites around Jupiter.

CRISPR allows gene editing, and thus for us to control our fate more than ever before. AI and the Quantum Computer, let alone neurology, enable us to become life and consciousness creators. We will have to elucidate what true progress really consists of, before creating with CRISPR all over. Not only we have become gods, but we have to admit it. Hence it’s all the more important that we tighten up the notion of truth, and not leave it for Jihadists and plutocrats to design, and impose truth according to their self-interested whims.

NO TRUTH, NO MORALITY

[I am very critical of the cult of Gandhi, considering what happened after he got control of India: more than ten million dead, and counting. However, I do use the occasional quote, and not just to keep my cynicism in shape…]

Eugen: Science also doesn’t ask if this or that finding about reality, even if thousand times experimentally verified, is truth or not. Science is claiming hypothesis that can be verified or refuted. If refuted, then the hypothesis is not valid, if verified, it means, it still was not refuted.

Answer: You start to sound like Karl Popper, who thought that science was all about refutation. But when a crow uses a spike to extract insects from tree bark, you are not going to tell the crow that it didn’t refute that the spike couldn’t be used to extract insects. The crow would, rightly, think you don’t know how to think.  

Popper thought too much about refutation. Sure, that’s how truth is established, so what? When a massive bell is tuned, metal is carefully removed by a lathe, until the bell sounds the right (“true”) tune.

In general, to find out what’s true, one eliminates what’s (experimentally) false. Initially Galileo looked at Jupiter and noted the “chance” alignment of several tiny stars with Jupiter and the ecliptic plane. The next night, looking at Jupiter on a whim, he noticed the “stars” had moved with Jupiter. So the hypothesis that they were “stars” was erroneous. Truth was established by elimination.

***

Eugen: Truth is a very different phenomenon. Truth, either you believe or you don’t.

Answer: No. In the entire human experience, truth is experimentally determined. Truth is why planes fly. Truth is experimentally determined, even in mathematics (and that’s the difference between mathematics and pure logics, where the notion of truth is much more restricted and still a matter of debate)

***

Eugen: You can’t prove or disprove truth.

Answer: This is the situation, only in pure logic, where “truth” is introduced by axioms (“propositional logic”), and, externally, by the universe within which the logic sits (the “context” in usual human parlance; there true propositions are introduced by hand). Still, it’s less easy than it looks as extremely elaborated debates on the notion of truth, even in this arena of logic and metalogic, was intensely debated around the 1950s (with unclear resolution; my conclusions about truth in logic are mine alone, and tend to simplify, if not oversimplify…)

In mathematics, baby examples are true (inasmuch as their axioms are true; many axioms were long implicit, even in Euclid and Archimedes… Or in today’s math. If you tell that to a research mathematician, s/he will often tend to get very angry…)

***  

Eugen: Patrice spoke about Euclidean geometry as being truth. Yes within its limited frame as a closed system or as Patrice called it, “attached context” it is truth. The same can be said about sentence like, “the water has property of wetness”. It is truth always, after all wetness can’t exist without water, and water can’t be not wet. But exactly as in case of wetness of water, Euclidean geometry, is only a system of words within themselves.

Answer: 1) water is not always “wet”. Ice is slippery as long as it is covered by a thin film of water. Without it, solid water is adherent. Pluto has towering ice mountains.

2) Science has found water is mostly H2O (there is some heavy water too: D2O).

3) Euclidean geometry is NOT just a “system of words”. It’s a system of words and a system of implications (either explicit, or implicit: all logic, except computer programming, contains implicit semantic drift). All together Euclidean Geometry is a logic, a “logos”.

The Christians were crafty enough, in the beginning to make “The Logos” GOD. That seduced the Neo-Platonists who ruled the empire, just below the plutocratic level. That was the bait.

Right now, many US pilots pass out in their jets: a F22 Raptor, the most sophisticated fighter in the US arsenal, crashed in 2010 that way, and the pilot, captain Haynes, was killed. Others followed since. Entire types were grounded at times for weeks. The entire fleet is affected, including F16s, F35s, etc. The cause is unknown. Some guess that the cause has to do with the very complicated software which controls the air given to the pilots and their pressure suits (one needs pressure to breathe at altitude…) This problem is still unsolved. Why? The truth has not yet been found.

***

Fake News, The Passion for Fiction, etc:

The Nobel Prize in literature was not given to non-fiction authors, for half a century (until Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich). You know people such as yours truly, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russel, Bergson, etc. Why? Because nonfiction is an inconvenient truth. Fiction writing is, by definition, not true, with fake news, fake creatures, and fake reality all around. Alexievich, a Bielorusian, implicitly criticizing the Bielorusian dictatorship, is safely removed from the leading dictating elite of the planet, so she is free to tell all the truths she wants… We may as well encourage her, to distract the Commons…

It’s no coincidence that France has seen its prominent industry collapse in recent decades, the mood turn gloomy, while so many French truths turned to lies. Naturally enough, France is now the most tobacco drugged out advanced country, especially young women. Something not right in France, just there! At the same time, the French writing establishment is obsessed with fiction. And out there roll out another sort of fake news: insipid “novels” which have nothing novel about them.

Lest the denizens of the sister Republic, the USA, start to chuckle, I will point out that the Clinton, Bush and Obama presidencies were fueled on so many lies (“Look at me, I’m brown, thus who cares that inequality is the highest ever, thanks to eight years of my policies??… which were actually mostly those of Clinton-Bush, where it counted most“). Thus the drug epidemics in the USA is now the most lethal ever. Opiates alone kill more than either guns or car. Why? Average people want to forget the lies. That’s also why they voted for Trump (who, at the very least, is more entertaining than the look-at-my-skin type… First orange hair is funnier than bronze skin…)

Most of the establishment has been intoxicated on its fake news, fake pre-occupations, etc. What it takes to sail a sea of lies.

***

Truth Is What Works:

When what was well-known before has been proven false, what is left is the truth. What does “truth” mean? It means that, when making a tool, or following a procedure while avoiding all known errors we end up with a tool, or procedure which works, something which is “true”. Because whatever does not work is an error.

It’s not very difficult to understand. But of course people who are in power are there because of an ideology, a system of thought, and, for them, that is the tool which is true, because it works for them.

It’s precisely because truth is what works that ideologies are true for their practitioners. But they are not THE TRUTH.

THE TRUTH, within, or about, an ideology, any ideology, even one with scientific pretense, is what’s left when an ideology’s lies have been detected and rejected.

Part of the mental intoxication from the elite has been to pretend that truth is all relative, can’t be proven, does not exist, never has, never will, and the “postmoderns” have been their prophets, while eating caviar and drinking champagne, while encouraging hard core Islam, and giving a pass to all things plutocratic. Weapons have been few and far between… Until Trump, a live Molotov cocktail to throw at the establishment.

Truth is what works: a definition of truth which works, a definition which is not supporting faith denying truth, the latter being the sort of faith I have no faith in!

If truth is what works, as I believe, the state of the planet is proof enough that we are collapsing under the weight of lies and errors ruling us into oblivion. Amen.

Patrice Ayme’

All We Need Is Truth

People are simple. And love to be simple. That’s why, for most of them, aside from their profession, all they know is “sports”, and it’s a new religion. Being complicated is expensive.

One commenter on my site, Benign, apparently obfuscated by my broadside against the delirious sexism of past and present Catholicism, called me “deluded to think that “rationality” even exists. Evolution does not “progress.” The Soviets “rationally” outlawed marriage from ~1918 to the 1940s, before realizing that this “rational” decision didn’t work.”

The USSR outlawed marriage???????? Same source which saw them drinking blood of “capitalists”? Logic is easy, truth is hard.

Modernist, Postmodernist, Metamodernist Jargon Is Jargon, and jargon ain’t truth! “Meta”, though, is a serious operation we all practice. See “Mind From Meta“.

Marriage is a fact of human ethology, the natural behavior of humans. To outlaw it would not have been irrational, because reason can always be found, but futile, as going against marriage goes against human nature. This is exactly why the Soviets didn’t outlaw marriage: they were not that dumb.

By the late 1920s, Soviet adults had been made more responsible for the care of their children, and common-law marriage had been given equal legal status with civil marriage. Is that what Benign alludes to? By 1944, the Soviets went back, and recognized only legal civil marriage, to encourage more steady families.

Rationality exists, but as I have emphasized in the past, as a constant rolling of the drums, a logic can be anything. That evolution “progresses” is a battle from 1800 CE, when Lamarck asserted this thesis. It’s correct: clearly some of today’s lifeforms are the most complex ever.  Some day all biologists will proudly view Lamarck as right, and their predecessors of the 1960s, who were fanatically anti-Lamarck, as deluded bigots.

How do I know Lamarck was right? Tons of knowledge that those who scream Lamarck was a maniac (following the slave master Napoleon) never heard of these tons, they are children.

To see evolution’s progress, don’t look at sharks, or oysters, and other animals in evolutionary stasis. Instead, look at Blue Rorquals, most massive animals ever, & look at us, most clever. The most advanced animals are the most complex, and they are complex in ways beyond what we understand of genetics.

Beatles sang: “All You Need Is Love!”. Silly stuff: we all got love, otherwise we won’t exist. We have all the logics, at our disposal, and all the love we got as children.

To order and discipline our logic, and even our loves, most of what we need is truth

“Postmodernism” was the realization that many ideologies were the fruit of tribalism, not truth (as they malevolently claimed). This is not really new. See  “vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au-delà“ de Pascal (a thought unpublished in his lifetime: truth before the Pyrénées, error beyond them)..

“Deconstruction” consisted in finding out where things came from. It’s not conceptually different from analysis (a unloosening), a concept found in Aristotle, and obvious centuries before him.

All this is to say that those who have pretended to introduce new ways of thinking about thinking have eschewed the truth: there is no truth, but truth, and, in the human species, it’s as old as dinner . There is no truth, but truth! In the human species, truth is as old as dinner. No truth, no dinner for the human, but one for the lion. The truth was in the dinner. In how to get dinner!

Right, truth is dangerous, because some claim to have it, and they don’t. But they always have, and always will. The Wise can’t go around, claiming they don’t have the truth, as Socrates did, or, worse, as Socrates claimed again and again, and the self-declared “post-modernists” parroted, that there is no truth… Because if they do that, they do exactly what German Jews (among others) did with Hitler and his Nazis: leave a wide open field for infamy to proclaim its own version of truth. And everybody, or, at least, most Germans, believed them. And others, like most Americans, pretended that it was OK with them.

The scientific method does NOT opposes the notion of truth, as those who have only a shallow knowledge of pop science are all too often led to believe. It’s exactly the opposite. Euclid’s theorem or the classical laws of optics are still true… They are actually more true than ever. In their domain of application. They are more true than ever, precisely because now we know where their domain of application came from. In other words, we control their meta-logic. We know where their truth come from, and where it’s located. And how to control it.

There is no logic without a metalogic, establishing therein, a notion of truth. Thinking is, and always was, an experimental process.

All we need is truth. But it’s the hardest thing. Truth never was, nor will ever be, a safe place. But it’s the safest place.

Patrice Ayme’

Should Present-Day Catholicism Be Made Unlawful?

Catholicism, as practiced in the past, would clearly be unlawful today: all the great leaders of Christianism of  five centuries ago, would be condemned to live in prison, but for those who would end their lives in psychiatric asylum. Should they resist by force, their fighters would have been eliminated as if they were the worst Jihadists, defending holocausts, or Aztec warriors, defending cannibalism.  

Catholicism, in its original form, its ancient form, its Salafist form, prescribed many atrocities (later carbon-copied by Islam). I will concentrate here just on a particularly inhuman prescription, sexism. Sexism is against nature, because the human species has evolved with little difference between males and females. This goes at the root of what it means to be human.

Catholicism says women are inferior creatures. This hurtful outrage is an ultra-violent contradiction of common human decency, common sense, science, human ethology, and human rights. Mass organizations violating both science and human rights should be outlawed.  

Catholic churchmen are still free to proselytize their contempt, not to say, hatred of women. Women can’t become priests, bishops, cardinals or popes: they are clearly viewed by the Catholic Church as inferior, misleading, depraved creatures. Why should such preaching be legal? 

Tyrant Constantine front and left, directs the Nicaea Council 325 CE, as seen in the 16 C….

To be fair, this religious misogyny started before Catholicism. Catholicism was an invention of the Roman Tyrant Constantine at the Council of Nicaea, in 325 CE (presently located in Islamizing Turkey). Constantine, born at York in England, son of his father, a “Caesar”, was a psychopath who conquered the entire Roman empire. Constantine killed his nephew, his wife and his highly successful son, just because he could. That was enough qualifications for Constantine to be made a saint by the Orthodox Church.

The earliest Christian writer is known as the so-called “Saint” Paul. I put “Saint” in quote, unquote, because in my religion no sexist pig is a saint. Saint Paul was a sexist, man-obsessed pig. I have nothing against homosexuals of the male gender, as long as they don’t disparage woman. But Saint Paul did. 

The Apostle Paul wrote that the “husband is head” and “wives, submit“, and that he was divinely inspired to write what he wrote… Catholic groups diverge in their interpretation of the following passage. Saint Paul wrote:

“But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head. A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.[1Cor 11:3–9]

In the first seven centuries after emperor Constantine, the self-described “13th Apostle” and certified bloody monster of the tyrannical type, priests could marry: Catholicism was overviewed by the Franks, who attached a lot of importance to living like Pagans, and (relatively) non-sexist Germans. The Franks had reinterpreted Catholicism their way. However, by 1026 CE, for the first time in centuries, the Catholic church was able to execute heretics.

What had changed? What had allowed Catholicism to draped itself in, and drip with, blood? Why the relapse into mass murdering theocratic fascism? Plutocracy unbound. The rise of plutocracy, self-described as “aristocracy”: hereditary positions of the wealthiest and the mightiest needed a mood to nurture their capture of civilization, and they had to justify that by the fascist Judeo-Christian god and His torturous, sexist ways.

At that point, the men who viewed women as objects of natural sexual interest were discouraged to join the Catholic Church. Men who preferred men were prefered. And naturally men who love children as sex objects.

So here we are: the Catholic hierarchy is stuffed with sex pedophiles. And the Catholic Church can’t deny this, lest it denies itself.

The present Pope talks a big talk, but he is, at the very least, sympathetic to pedophiles. A fact. For a millennium, the Catholic Church has induced its professionals to approach children, with love (pedo-philia, literally) rather than approach adult women, with love. Thus all too many professional Catholics came to view children as sex objects. And getting away with it. A striking example is the right hand man of the present Pope, now back in Australia to face damning charges… Francis I gives moral lessons to entire planet, but socialized for years with an outrageous pedophile.

As the New York Magazine puts it in “The Pope’s Pedophile?”By Andrew Sullivan:

“Well into Pope Francis’s pontificate, one of his closest aides, the third-highest official in the Catholic Church, Cardinal George Pell, has now been credibly accused of several acts of sexual assault, including one of rape. Australian police have concluded that the evidence they have is sufficient to move forward, even in cases that happened long ago… A cloud has hung over Pell since he was an Episcopal vicar in a parish in the 1970s that has been described as a “pedophile’s paradise and a child’s nightmare. A full 15 years ago, Pell was accused of molesting a 12-year-old boy but when the church investigated, a retired Supreme Court justice found that there wasn’t enough evidence, even though the victim appeared to be “speaking honestly from actual recollection.” A year later, Pope John Paul II made Pell a cardinal. Several new alleged victims spoke out in a book published only last month. In 2015, Australia’s Channel 9 ran a 60 Minutes segment that can only be called horrifying. In it, one of Francis’s own appointees to investigate sex abuse, Peter Saunders, described Pell’s record on sexual abuse as “almost sociopathic.” Pell had a “catalogue of denials … a catalogue of denigrating people, of acting with callousness,” Saunders said on camera. “I would go as far to say that I consider him to be quite a dangerous individual…

The notorious case of the founder of the Legion of Christ, Marcial Maciel, comes to mind. Protected by Pope John Paul II, coddled by Benedict XVI, he was also defended by an array of theological arch-conservatives as a paragon of virtue… It comes as no surprise, for example, that Pell has upheld, like Maciel, a highly conservative theology on sexuality — which was why he was so favored by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. He opposed the use of condoms to stop AIDS in Africa, refused to give communion to openly gay people, campaigned strenuously against marriage equality, and described the church sex-abuse scandal as not a function of minor abuse and cover-up but of allowing homosexuals to be priests (a ban on gay seminarians remains formally in place). In his own words: “80 percent of the abuse is with young boys. So I mean it’s obviously connected with the problem of homosexuality … We’ve got to see that [homosexuality] is not tolerated amongst clergy and religious orders.” To which I have to echo David Ridsdale: “Fuck you, George, and everything you stand for.”

What I cannot understand is why Pope Francis chose to advance this man under this cloud so high up the hierarchy. If Pell is found guilty, Francis will have advanced an accused abuser of children to the highest echelon in the Vatican. Far from cleaning the church of this evil, he will have contaminated it at its very apex. That’s why this case is indeed a watershed for Catholicism and Francis himself. If Francis can turn a blind eye to this, we can trust no one.”

What is there, not to understand? It’s in plain sight! The Catholic Church is intrinsically dangerous: most Catholics, with the possible exception of Saint Martin, Saint Francis and a few others, are toxic for civilization, because they abuse not just little boys, but reason. As Emperor Julian had diagnosed around 360 CE, Catholicism was very dangerous to civilization, just because of that point ( and basically all the great social advances ascribed to Roman Catholicism originated in Rome, not Catholicism, which piggy-backed on Rome). Catholicism was basically PC, Political Correctness, gone self-sanctifying and lethal. Many of the Saints of Catholicism were mass-criminally insane (example Saint Bernard, author of the Second Crusade, more Pope than the Pope Himself, and from a Pluto family, to boot; same for the demented Saint Louis, author of more insane texts than the Marquis de Sade, but not meant to be fiction, but all too real threats…)

Sexism is not legal. Sexism should not be preached. Private conversation is one thing, public address, another. Preaching sexism should be unlawful.

The reasons to crack down now on Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Judaism are multiple. An obvious reason is that, each time perverse religions dwell in hyper-sexism, the practitioners of these nasty primitive faiths point at Christianism. Islamists, in particular, claim that sexism  Naive philosophers such as Michel Onfray make the situation worse by calling our civilization “Judeo-Christian”. That leaves us no choice, but to carpet bomb “Judeo-Christianism” into smithereens.

A more advanced reason is that we need humanity to be as intelligent as possible, as soon as possible: the easiest way to do that is to insure women have the same access to education, and to the motivation to acquire education, as men. Mostly women mostly educate children, early on, keep that in mind: a sexist society is necessarily a more stupid society than it otherwise would be, absent the sexism.

Still an even more overwhelming reason is that we have entered the age of reason. It’s reason, or die.

A hint: the young thermonuclear cannibal in North Korea. The irrationality of Catholicism, which views, half of humanity as inferior (same as (Islamism), and enforces that vision, should not be tolerated, but eradicated.

Everybody needs somebody to love. The Catholic Church says that men should not love women. The Pope, Francis, says this. His collaborators, not to call them accomplices, are left to love small children, because small children are all they have around, aside from each other and their perverse ideology. Enough. You want to fight Islamism? Fighting the abuses of Catholicism may be the easiest way to start doing so.

Mass irrationality implementing stupidity is not just deeply inhuman. It implies the end of intelligence. Perhaps of intelligence in the galaxy. This is not just about us. Let’s make sexist mass ideologies seriously preached unlawful: at some point civilization has to progress.

Patrice Ayme’