WHEN DIRECT DEMOCRACY FAILED: ATHENS LOST HER MIND, FIRST, THEN POWER (Fall of Real Democracy I)

Hatred is a loving mistress… Let’s thank those nasty enough to advertise the notion (in the USA a famous PC actor suggested to rape the son of the president)… But there is worse than the excesses hatred brings: one could verse in the opposite extreme, and lose passions enough to sink in the morass of mercantilism, while the spirit of the highest passions breaks down (liberty, critical thinking, fraternity, equality).

This collapse of the towering will to liberty, critical thinking, fraternity, equality happened to Athens at a vulnerable point of her history. Thus a dispirited Athens didn’t fight to death, as she had many times before. The Macedonian dictator Antipater, senior general of Philip and Alexander, was able to take advantage (although it required two sea battles). We, humanity, lost Direct Democracy. We haven’t recovered it yet! (Losses on the battlefield of the best Athenians may explain some of the lack of enthusiasm)

In an imaginable history, Athens would have durably installed her empire, as a constellation of allied Direct Democracies all the way to Massalia, and beyond, incorporated later Rome as junior partner… Etc.

However, it’s not too late. We need to recover what the Athenians had, and do it better, and on a planetary scale. It’s like talking to Kim Un Jung, chairman of nuclear armed North Korea: no choice. And much more important.

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Consider how Greece went from democracies to kings: after Thebes won a costly tactical victory at the battle of Mantinea, in 362 BCE, which was a strategic defeat, Thebes and its Boeotian League saw its influence wane, and Athens became supreme again. One would have expected Athens to use the occasion to rebuild vigorously its empire.

 

The power of Athens is overlooked today. Here it is, in picture. Panathenaic stadium by the Athenian statesman Lykourgos (Lycurgus) c. 330 BC, primarily for the Panathenaic Games. It was rebuilt in marble by Herodes Atticus, an Athenian Roman senator, by 144 AD and had a capacity of 50,000 seats. The stadium was used for the relaunch of the Olympic Games by Baron de Coubertin. The Olympic Games, started in 776 BCE continued for nearly 12 centuries, until Catholic thus Super Fascist Roman Emperor Theodosius I decreed in 393 CE that all such “pagan cults” should be banned.

An alternate history where Athens leads civilization is entirely conceivable, and we came very close to that. For example the battle of Chaeronea of Greek city states against the invading Philip of Macedonia, in 338 BCE, could have been won. The battle was in balance for several hours, before the Macedonian crushed both wings of the poleis. Indeed, Sparta was not at Chaeronea. Had it been there, it is likely that Philip and his self-made army would have been extinguished. but, well, Sparta was clearly dispirited, after two defeats at the hands of Thebes (Leuctra and Mantinea).

Athens population (whole of the peninsula of Attikḗ, including women, children) was probably 300,000, and the Delian League also known as the Athenian empire was more than one million (a population comparable to Rome then, and a much greater area, lots of it, sea, and a state which was the world’s most advanced technologically… differently from Rome, which, then, didn’t even have one warship!).

Athens had industry (manned by slaves), its added value products were highly valued in antiquity. She also had a large population with lots of foreign borns. It needed lots of food, but Attica, one of the driest part of Greece, couldn’t produce it. So Athens imported “grain” from the Black Sea shores which came through, thanks to its ally Byzantium. When that occasionally faltered, grain would come from the Greek colony in Cyrenaica (yes, Libya). In any case, long trade routes enabled Athens to exist.

Athens needed an empire to survive. (Differently from the present USA, which is, like Russia, a self-sufficient empire… more so than say China.. However Europe is not self-sufficient, as long as it is fossil fuels dependent… it gets its oil and gas from all around, from Algeria to Siberia…)

There was another problem in the Fourth Century BCE: no Greek polis (= City-State) was powerful enough to dominate Greece, and thus to become sizable enough a power to resist the colossal power of the fascist Persian empire to the east. The Persian empire was a global plutocratic power, a violent hierarchy of tyrannies and mighty governors, all at the mercy of cruel end-of life treatments such as being split by trees slowly, or even more slowly, eaten by worms while entrapped, well fed, between boats). The potentiality of such violence guaranteed its precautionary usage, as soon as possible (the Macedonian courts worked pretty much along the same one, and thus it’s no wonder Macedônia, led by Aléxandros ho Mégas, conquered Persia: qui se ressemble, s’assemble….)

Persia ruled from the Mediterranean all the way to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. On the Mediterranean shores,  Persia was occupying and terrorizing the Greek democracies spread along what is now the Turkish coast.

Persia was a superpower, but it was a fascist plutocracy, somewhat malevolent, civilizationally and spiritually opposed to the Greek poleis. Plutocracy (Persia) is antagonistic to direct democracy and a mentally creative civilization (as found in the greatest Greek cities).

Hence the war between Persia and (mostly) Athens: it was directly related to the mental creativity of Athens. By the third quarter of the Fourth Century (after circa 350 CE), Athens and Persia had been at war for 150 years, much of it with Persia using its gold to launch other Greek city states against Athens (such as Sparta, which won the Peloponnesian war against Athens in the end because Persia bought it a fleet so big and good, it destroyed the Athenian navy, by surprise).

The war between Greece and Persia had been caused fundamentally by the irremediable antagonism between intellectual fascism (Persia) and mental creativity (Athens).

However, by 360 BCE, Athens’ creativity and mental exuberance had been broken. Meeting of the Ecclesia were more like shareholders meetings (it was written at the time). Instead of writing new, rash literary works. “Classics” became an obsession, and the “classical” mood paralysed new mental creation: none of the writings then have survived, or then they care more about gossip than grand conceptions. The art, even in simple pottery, also decayed, going from manly themes to superficial stuff. Some “feminists” and PC or New Age imbeciles may object to what I just said, and would call be names (that’s what they do best). However, they don’t understand that it’s brute force which enables them to exist.

(Canadians, for example, love to pose as pacifists, equal opportunity, wealthy from honest work. But their wealth and peace comes from having massacred the Natives and the environment, and also the French… In general European colonies of the Anglo-Saxon type find easy to give moral lessons, as they eradicated, annihilated and holocausted their potential opposition, prior… Some will scoff: but watch Trudeau: he speaks PC, while exploiting the dirtiest oil on the planet. Money speaks best, when it makes its victim believe its lies)

Indeed, when you are surrounded by barbarians, and, even worse, Persians, half-civilized, half-savage, horrendously efficient in war, the military aspect of civilization has to be prime (something the USA has understood very well… for centuries, and France, for 17 centuries, clearly: the Frankish confederation was primarily a military organization, and succeeded to do, on a much grander scale what the Greeks tried to do: consider the Athenian empires, and the Boeotian federation).

Some will object that I called the Persians, “savage” (and that’s not PC! And Phocion started it, and he was a very good man). But they were. Savage. The Persians. It’s not just about Persians. The Athenian general Phocion, learning that the Ecclesia was going to take measures against Macedonia, exclaimed:”Why would you provoke that savage man?” The “savage man” was the twenty year old Alexander (soon to be “the Great”). Alexander (with Antipater, and thousands of Athenian prisoners just liberated) had visited Athens. The Athenians met Alexander in person. Alexander had crushed them in battle with his cavalry. Phocion was right. Soon Alexander annihilated Thebes: killing all men, and boys, selling surviving women and children into slavery. A sort of warning to Athens, and everybody else, no doubt.  

Plutocracy has imposed itself, worldwide, by disguising its existence. The massive and crucial support of US plutocracy, between 1914 and 1945 to the worst animus in Germany, has been successfully obliterated from the official version of history.

These propaganda coups and massive distortions of real history can be sleekly done, because we don’t have Direct Democracy anymore: after all, we don’t have an ecclesia, an assembly of We the People, where everybody can debate. Raucous disagreement, as Athens had, has disappeared!

I cannot go out there, as many a philosopher in Athens did, and open up on the powers that be, for all the people to see (Socrates didn’t do this, instead his students established a dictatorship in Athens; but Socrates’ present repute is much exaggerated; other philosophers, including several close friend or married to Pericles, played a much more important role than Socrates, in the evolution of civilization; for example Pericles’ second wife, from the Ionian coast, established the notion of “Open Society” which Pericles advertised in his famous Funeral Oration…) Instead, here I am writing hopefully for the future…

In theory we could adapt the political structures to the new technology, and relaunch Direct Democracy: human beings have adapted to new technological possibilities for more than two million years.

We could go out there, and make our opinion known: after all, the Internet gives us those powers, at least, potentially. Those powers of debate. We need Athenian Direct Democracy back. After all, we now have robots to do most of the work (overruling an objection of Aristotle who correctly pointed out that Athens couldn’t do without slaves as the Greeks didn’t have machines for everything). We, We The People, can concentrate on the work Athenian philosophers used to do: thinking right, or, at least, better!

Patrice Ayme

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Separating Children From Parents: A Crime. Not Fixing Guatemala Also A Crime

In my general semantics, plutocracy is exactly what that word says: the evil (Pluto) power (kratia). Plutocracy, the Dark Side ruling, is not just about money ruling (it’s a point on which I am in agreement with the mythical Jesus…) Sob story in New York Times about a mother separated from her son, then sent back to Guatemala, while her son, 8 years old, is left in the tender loving care of US judges. (Horrendous stories about babies and toddlers crying on the floor by the hundreds, torn from their deported parents, are circulating in the comment section of the New York Times.)

‘I Can’t Go Without My Son’:
A Deported Mother’s Plea
As a growing number of families are being separated as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to control illegal immigration, some parents are being deported without their children.

US tender loving care as its typical best. An officer at a detention center gave Elsa Ortiz a phone number to get in contact with her son, but said she was deported before she could use it. CreditMarian Carrasquero/The New York Times

To separate children from parents was practiced by Canada and Australia less than 60 years ago. It is recognized, by the United Nations’ law as a crime against humanity. It is especially horrendous when babies and toddlers are concerned.

Famously, the USA refused entry to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Nazi Germany, including Jews, in the 1930s and 1940-41. Most got stuck in France, and when France fell to the Nazis attack, dozens of thousands of these refugees were hunted across occupied France, found out, and then deported and assassinated by the Nazis.

However, Guatemala is not quite Nazi Germany. Yet if it is too much a place of criminal state activity (as the mother of that child asserts), it should be the duty of the US government to do something about it, at the government level.

Once again what happened with Nazism should be a guide: not only France accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Nazis, but, finally, France declared war to the Nazis (September 3, 1939). That, unfortunately led to the fall and occupation of France ten months later (and death of many refugees, as I said). Yet, there was an overall beneficial effect: the Nazis were not ready for war in 1939, and thus ultimately lost it (in 1945… when the Nazis had initially intended to go to war, with enough weapons).

Conclusions: separating parent and child is borderline crime against humanity, no ifs and buts. However, a strong deterrent, indeed. A better, and much less controversial deterrent would be to bring US power to improve matters in, say, Guatemala, by bearing onto the government there. That’s absolutely needed! Precisely by bringing enough power, including economic sanctions against higher-ups, to change things there for a tolerable level, or, at least, mightily push in that direction!

Some will whine it didn’t work with Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and now Venezuela. But that’s not right. Gentle pressure worked well in several of these countries, and also Peru, Columbia, or, for that matter, South Africa. Law enforcement is a global problem. By letting plutocrats roam free and arrange the world to suit themselves, we encourage global crime.

Arguably, it’s even the other way around: take Mexico. Under the guise of privatizing, the Mexican government gave Carlos Slims, a fifth generation plutocrat, the national telecommunication company, for pennies on the dollar. Slims became the world’s wealthiest man (and greatest owner of New York Times class A shares…) So doing, corruption blossomed at the very highest level of Mexican government, hence encouraging it at all levels. Meanwhile the new class of power addicts in the USA got drugged on cocaine (as Obama proudly flaunts in his pseudo-auto biography), creating a huge demand for organized crime networks to export said cocaine in the US. Hence a gang war in Mexico, which killed more than 100,000, and incited many Mexicans to flee to the USA.

So the US can do more than put innocent eight year olds in prison, making them into orphans: instead, send US drug addicts of the highest type to prison, the sort which crow about their addiction in print … and push to clean Mexico, in part by doing so…

Patrice Ayme

Note 1: Attorney General Sessions claimed that illegal immigrants coming with children is a deliberate tactic, as it more than tripled in a few years, from 14,000 to 71,000… Hence the need for a crackdown. BTW, there is a Federal Law which says one can’t separate parent from child for more than a few days… Except for good judicial reason… Otherwise it’s definitively child abuse.

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Note 2: DHS claims 10,000 children presently in the care of HHS (they are transferred from DHS to HHS within 72 hours) were sent separated from their parents, with strangers, and that’s how separation happened. Policy already existed under Obama. Trump says he “hates the policy”, asks Congress to change the law. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, says that 14,500 children came recently, WITHOUT PARENTS… And more than 11,000 are now under custody. (Total number of people arrested average 15,000 a month.)

250 children are caught a day… and send to school…

Organics on Mars? More Importantly, Water Long Ago, Now Ice Cliffs!

On this site, all sorts of essays are found. Some are on the cutting edge of research (and a subset of those may even be right! After all just one somewhat right, on a subject of significance, would justify all my efforts…). We live in times when, for the first time ever, the social Machiavellianism of a biological species, yours truly, has the fate of the biosphere, and maybe even of intelligent life in this galaxies, in its paws. That has got to have happened many times in the billions of galaxies, long ago and far away. But this is here now, and philosophy and its practical side, politics, are in the driver seat of the honor of intelligence in the Milky Way…

So here is the time to celebrate the little world next door, Mars. Mars, although half the linear dimensions of Earth, has exactly as much land as Earth (2/3 of Earth is sea). Recent discoveries have put Mars in a more habitable light.

Big picture for Mars remains that the rover is in what used to be a giant lake one hundred kilometers across. So Mars WAS HABITABLE. For about a billion years. Whether life evolved there is not clear: Earth is a giant churning engine of creation, with perhaps kilometer high tides at some point, every couple of hours or so… That forcefully mixed continent, sea, volcanoes, lightning, etc. If life had evolved on Mars, though, it would have transferred on Earth… thanks to impacts…

Ice Cliffs on Mars, 100 meters tall, took me by surprise… A happy surprise: without water on Mars, colonization a no-go

All this is much more agitated and eventful than the old picture…
Those towering, 100 meters high cliffs of ice on Mars. Last year. That makes Mars colonization feasible (once we have a huge energy source, like portable thermonuclear fusion…

NASA announced the discovery of organics on Mars. Ian Miller’s blog put that into perspective.
This sort of discoveries, ice cliffs now, and water four billion years ago, are more impactful than whether life evolved there. Hunting for fossils is how to solve that one… And will not be easy: 4 billion year old fossils on Earth are very controversial…

I am a bit impact and significance obsessed… in all matters. The hierarchy of all values comes from the hierarchy of significance. That Mars is colonizable, because it has water, is a huge piece of information, full of hope. A hope to spread humanity beyond our endangered cradle. But we don’t have all the technology we need yet: even if the cost of launches is brought as low as Elon Musk hopes (6 million dollars per launch of his giant BFR rocket, he claimed…), we don’t have an energy source for Mars: a worldwide dust storm has just plunged the planet in obscurity, and a solar powered rover had to shut itself down. (the Curiosity rover is nuclear powered, so it’s not affected… It was the last nuclear power pack, or so… Nuclear ain’t PC, you know…)

Pretty much we will need to develop controlled nuclear fusion to go melt those huge cliffs of ice… Some will scream at ecological devastation. Not so: right now, the European Union, this high temple of hypocrisy and things not being what they seem to be, import enough palm oil from South East Asia to kill all the Orangutans there… Among other life forms. And what does it do with all this food? Fuel! Fuel which the EU, in its colossal madness and criminal alacrity to invert all values, view as more important than life itself! Yes, most of the palm oil imported to Europe is turn into car exhausts…

Palm oil is one of the main engines of environmental destruction. Found in food and cosmetics, its growing use is destroying rainforests and endangering all species of much of the world. And indeed, more than half of all the palm oil imported by Europe is turned into biodiesel and blended into fuel (the US does the same with corn, but that’s more honest, less colonialist, as it is the US Middle West itself that is devastated by growing too much corn…)

Conquering the Solar System, colonizing it, will force us to use much more efficient techniques. Then we can recycle those new technologies on Earth, to reduce our impact on the home planet…So it is highly moral, not just games in space to feel better about ourselves, and distract us from gravitas. For example Photovoltaics (“PV”) used in space have nearly 50% efficiency, more than twice the one realized on the ground (they are also more expensive…) On the ISS, sweat and urine are 100% recycled…

Art, morality are children of our technology, itself the expression of science.

Patrice Ayme

 

Bitcoin Is Organized Crime

I have explained in the past what is fundamentally wrong with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: a currency is actually an expression of military and judicial might. A currency needs a state, or states, to back it up, and is a tool thereof: a state, or union of states, can exist without a currency, not reciprocally

Another problem with the concept of bitcoin is that crypto currencies rest on the the “blockchain”, a perfectly inefficient, energy devouring and thus ecologically criminal, idiotic technology… Which could be useful only if information and computation were ecologically free (instead I have proposed “AWE”… which is ultimate efficiency).

Indeed, the “blockchain” records all transactions everywhere, anytime… instead of some transactions by trusted actors. Bitcoin fanatics say they have a right to ravage the planet, because they don’t trust those “trusted” actors. Well, neither do I I say: make the actors (governments, and their agents, the banks) more trustworthy.

Bitcoiners have also insisted their activity was beyond any suspicion, it’s honest, it’s new age, it’s a new dawn, the geek world, better than anything the Greeks offered… Helpful bitcoiners sent me messages offering to educate me, in all sorts of ways. All this, in total violation of the simplest observation of the Bitcoin graph, which looks like a Tulip Mania. Just worse:

Market Capitalization of Cryptocurrencies dropped by ⅔, generating more than 200 billion dollars of losses.

And indeed, turning things on their heads, there is a new reason to criticize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: they are manipulated by organized crime. Bitcoin enthusiasts may counterpunch that central banks are organized crime; well, I agree, and wrote so for more than a decade; however, it’s not because Rome is on fire that one should start new fires! Bitcoin enthusiasts should go the way of Nero.

 

• New research observes that at least half of the 2017 rise in bitcoin prices was due to coordinated price manipulation using another cryptocurrency called tether.
• The 66-page paper says tether was used to buy bitcoin at carefully selected moments when it was declining, which helped “stabilize and manipulate” the cryptocurrency’s price.
• “In general I research things that are potentially illegal, and there’s a lot of rumors surrounding potential questionable activity in cryptocurrencies,” says University of Texas finance professor John Griffin, who has a decade-long track record of flagging fraud in financial markets.

Here is the paper’s abstract:

John M. Griffin

University of Texas at Austin – Department of Finance

Amin Shams

University of Texas at Austin – Department of Finance

Date Written: June 13, 2018

Abstract

This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to U.S. dollars, influences Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the recent boom. Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.

Keywords: Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Prices, Tether

Suggested Citation:

Griffin, John M. and Shams, Amin, Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered? (June 13, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=

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Why was Bitcoin Organized geek Crime tolerated? Because those one bought, one owns! 

All this was long obvious. As it was that organized crime used Bitcoin (didn’t just manipulate it). A high level contractor of Google told me the government (under Obama) was perfectly aware, but let it run its course. That may look strange. But not so, once one has realized that the government knows that conventional banking is organized crime, a major engine of inequality, worldwide: bankers create money, and they create it, for their friends.

By letting Bitcoin run its perverse criminal course, many geeks made lots of money, getting ethically very dirty in the process, while growing in power and influence by leaps and bounds. Same general strategy as with holding the world economy hostage of monopolies (GAFA, FANG, etc.): all these dirty, wealthy people are now stakeholders in the engine of criminal inequality. Organized criminality got them there, and their now criminally confirmed minds make them most qualified to help run the world… as the little soldiers of dirt. They are all accomplices in crime, so they will shut up, cooperate, and subjugate. Thus geeks may as well implement the system, they are not just crucial to the system… They are it (or so they think, and thus will thereafter behave as the true holders of power want them to).

When Augustus seized the Roman Republic, and made it his personal thing, he was not alone: several millions stakeholders (mostly having to do with the Roman army, its suppliers, accomplices, etc.) were helping him out. He had cultivated them carefully. Same now.

 

Patrice Ayme

Will Starburst Galaxies Explode the Big Bang?

There are MUCH MORE GIANT STARS THAN EXPECTED IN THE UNIVERSE (Factor of ten?)

I have proposed that the Big Bang Model is wrong, and that the universe could be much older, of the order of 100 billion years old, not 13.8 billion years; my iconoclastic and inconsiderate reasoning was philosophical: we have one expansion mechanism, DARK ENERGY. That expansion, Dark Energy, was directly observed, it exists, it’s not a figment of imagination. Many a physicist made a sour face, as Dark Energy was not expected at all: hundreds of arrogant  claims to explain the whole universe, talk to the media and the gullible as if one were god, and then, next thing one knows, one’s theories don’t explain 95% of the universe…

So an insolent philosophy asked: ‘Why would we need another cosmic expansion mechanism?’ Especially one expansion mechanism NOT directly observed, a figment of the imagination, the so-called Inflaton Field, necessary to make the Big Bang theory work (because of arcane complications: basically the universe as observed is around 100 billion light years across, and can have got that big only if it expanded at 10^10 times the speed of light, or something like this… Confusing enough? I have explained what is going on here and there, such as the locality of the speed of light, and the embedding theorem of Lorentzian manifolds. Stay tuned…)

A (Non Spectacular) Starburst galaxy, the Cigar, 12 million light year away. Full starburst galaxies are very blue, from the giant extremely hot (thus blue) stars in their midst. How much do we know about Helium formation in such super giant stars? Philosophers want to know!

So why is the Big Bang necessary? Besides making some people more puffed up than god itself?

Inspired by the H bombs they were thoroughly familiar with, Gamow, Alpher and Herman proposed the hot Big Bang as a means to produce all of the elements: extreme heat caused collisions and the nuclei fused (from the “STRONG FORCE”).

The lightest elements (hydrogen, helium, deuterium, lithium) were produced in the Big Bang nucleosynthesis

Ms. Burbidge, Mr. Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle worked out the nucleosynthesis processes that go on in stars, where the much greater density and longer time scales allow the triple-alpha process (He+He+He –>> C) to proceed and make the elements heavier than helium.

But BBFH could not produce enough helium. The solution, which Hoyle didn’t like at all, was to make the Helium in the Big Bang. Now we think we know that both processes occur: most helium is produced in the Big Bang but carbon and everything heavier is produced in stars. Most lithium and beryllium is produced by cosmic ray collisions breaking up some of the carbon produced in stars.

In a pirouette, Helium abundance is now viewed the observation which makes the Big Bang necessary… Yet, all this rests on an ironclad understanding of stellar physics… which we assume we have, although we don’t.

Astronomers at the gigantic, high altitude Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile investigated intense bouts of star formation in four distant, gas-rich starburst galaxies, where new stars are formed 100 or more times faster than they are in the Milky Way.

By looking at isotopes ratio in Inter Stellar Medium (ISM) Carbon Monoxide CO, one can see if it has been generated in light, or heavy stars. To quote from the original article in Nature: “

“Oxygen, carbon and their stable isotopes are produced solely by nucleosynthesis in stars. The minor isotopes, 13C and 18O, are released mainly by low- and intermediate-mass stars (those with stellar mass less than eight solar masses, M* < 8M⊙) and massive stars (M* > 8M⊙), respectively, owing to their differing energy barriers in nuclear  reactions and evolution of stars. These isotopes then mix with the interstellar medium (ISM) such that the 13C/18O abundance ratio measured in the ISM becomes a ‘fossil’, imprinted by evolutionary history and the stellar initial mass function (IMF). The abundances of the 13CO and C18O isotopologues in the molecular ISM, whose measurements are immune to the pernicious effects of dust, are therefore a very sensitive index of the IMF in galaxies.”

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Conclusion of the Nature article:

“Classical ideas about the evolutionary tracks of galaxies and our understanding of cosmic star-formation history are challenged. Fundamental parameters governing galaxy formation and evolution—star-formation rates, stellar masses, gas-depletion and dust-formation timescales, dust extinction laws, and more—must be re-addressed, exploiting recent advances in stellar physics.”

This doesn’t prove my ideas about the universe are right. Yet the article mention star formation rates have to be lowered by a factor of… seven. (I will resist multiplying 13.8 billions by 7, which is… not making this up, very close to 98 billions…)

This doesn’t prove my ideas about the universe are right… But it goes my way… Ok, let a professional concludes:

“Our findings lead us to question our understanding of cosmic history,” Rob Ivison, co-author of the study and director for science at European Southern Observatory, said in the statement. “Astronomers building models of the universe must now go back to the drawing board, with yet more sophistication required.“

Moods, in science cannot change until evidence contrary to the old visions one had of things, accumulate. Before that, a change of paradigm can’t be hoped for. Long ago, when I used to be all too human, I communicated with a director at ESO. Delighted by the change of tone, not to say mood… (Another guy I knew was so arrogant that he posited one was not really a scientist until one was the director of a lab, which he happened to be… in astrophysics, the field at hand, where it turns out the big picture was missed…)

But, ladies and gentlemen, remember this: wisdom, even scientific wisdom, doesn’t always triumph in a timely manner. We have examples in science, and mathematics, where wisdom was delayed and defeated for 24 centuries… by the greatest stupidity

Patrice Ayme

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Examples of delayed wisdom: a) The Atomic Theory, of course, complete with eternal motion in the small (which the Greeks had observed and is strikingly described by Lucretius). The theory was then forgotten until the 19C.

b) The Archimedean Axiom in arithmetic/theory of infinity, undetected until 1950, when the US logician/mathematician Robinson detected it.

c) Non-Euclidean geometry found 24 centuries ago, and then lost until 1830 CE…

d) Biological evolution theory, lost between Anaximander and Lamarck… Although practiced by all serious breeders (especially Greek).

e) Computers, lost for 17 centuries… we have one proof the Antikyra mechanism (and various written description) until Blaise Pascal… Hence the computer language “Pascal”

f) Heliocentric theory of Aristarchus of Samos lost between Archimedes and Buridan (and buried again by Catholicism) Heliocentrism was of course obvious, except if one is a caveman, and not to observant…

g) And of course that Earth was round and how big, established and measured first by the great scientist and explorer Pytheas of Massalia (Pytheas de Marseilles), circa 320 BCE. Pytheas even related the tides to the Moon, and got the explanation roughly right (whereas Galileo Galilei, 19 centuries later, got the explanation of the tides completely wrong, and not just that but got a near lethal fight with his friend the Pope, who he brushed off as an ignorant… when the Pope was actually less wrong than Galileo…)

Banque Rothschild Employee Lectures US President

Macron loves to quote classical (French) literature: it makes him look smart, and it’s all he knows. Well, let me help him by giving him more classical literature to quote. Macron addressed Trump, we have the picture. Macron and his colleagues, the “leaders” of the “free” world, are just employed by the big bosses who got them elected, and aspire to be employed even better in the future, by the same culprits, who are beyond any suspicion. However, Trump is a boss they can’t have… because he doesn’t play the game all the other leaders do, and have been created by. Hence a classical drama. Let me reveal what Macron really meant to say:

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Macron, French president (see photo below):”Hey Donald, what’s the beef about US milk being taxed 270% by Canada? I mean, who cares about milk farmers? In France they wake up at 3am to milk the cows, imagine that! How much more low life can one be? Milk farmers work all day, and they make as much money in a year that I made at Rothschild in 5 minutes.  

Merkel is centre stage, arms planted on a table, with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, standing to her left, arms folded and a look of resignation on his face. {Photo by German Chancellery.]
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, stunning Bolton, irritating Trump, stands next to Merkel, partially obscured. Macron, a natural, self-assured talking head, and he talks in English too, is the one addressing Trump. British prime minister. Theresa May, more obscured still, is at the right of Macron.

I mean, Donald, you want me to milk cows, that’s why you care about milk so much? I couldn’t even buy business suit on that salary! So, Donald, why should I care about milk farmers? I mean, look at you Donald, you have made your billions. Nobody here can trust you: you employ people, you go on TV, you say:’You are fired!’ I mean, what’s that? You relish it! We are just employees, we do what the masters want. But all the masters, Donald, not just you it’s not all about you. Masters don’t like you, Donald, although you are one of them, precisely because you are one of them. You don’t act dignified, Donald, you don’t understand that you and the other masters are wealthy and powerful because the little guys, the milk farmers, and other working stiffs, those losers RESPECT the international order which enables people like us to prosper. As you insult, us the employees, you insult all the powers which made us possible.

We can’t trust you, Donald! You are just one. We need to find other multibillionaire to trust. Many are ten times or much more, wealthier than you. You see, Donald, you are the multibillionaire here. We, the leaders of the free world, we need to find multibillionaire to employ us afterwards, after our public service. Look at kanzler Schroeder, or British PM Major and Blair: they became very wealthy after their public service, that’s only normal, because they serve the powers which make the International Order possible.

 

And we can’t trust you, Donald. And you can’t employ us all, anyway, it would look bad. So we have to get employment elsewhere, with the other guys. And you know what, Donald, they don’t trust you those guys, and they are wise, call them wise guys if you want. Remember president Kennedy, JFK? He called businessmen son of bitches, He said his dad called them that way and now that he was president, he could see how right he was. Remember? The CIA held Cuba, and United Fruit held Cuba. Wise guys, all of them. And that young prick of JFK dropped the CIA and United Fruit. Next thing, JFK was dead, in a hail of bullets for all to see, and nobody admitted to doing it. So, Donald, you want me to be that prick? Do you want me to be wealthy like Blair, or dead like JFK?

 

Yeah, of course, you are as wealthy as Kennedy, you don’t care, you just want to “Make America Great Again”, because you have so much money all you aspire to, is play hero. As Allen Dulles head of the CIA said: “that little Kennedy he thought he was god”. Do you feel like god, Donald? Do you understand Google, Apple, facebook, the NSA are all part of the Deep State? Clinton, Bush and Obama, you predecessors, 24 years of US presidents, saw to it.

 

You think you can go there, and destroy the one percent? Do you realize that 1% of the West, that’s around twenty million people? Do you want to destroy the livelihood of twenty million people Donald? And think of the top .1%, Donald! That’s still two million people who hold all the networks of power, all the media, all the banks. People who can employ us, Donald, when we have finished serving the public. And compensate us as we deserve, for sustaining the established order you are so anxious to destroy.

 

You say it’s different now, Donald But why do you think Google, Apple, Facebook pay no taxes in Ireland and spy on everybody? Because the Deep State wants it, Donald. And who set that up? Not just Obamaba, whatever his name. Oblabla was just an employee, an employee of the wise guys, he, and his team of carefully chosen incompetents who know nothing served them well… Oblabla knew how to calm all the losers and low lives out there, Donald. Instead you are just exciting them, making them believe it’s not all over for them, Donald. It is. The wealthy owns the world, and we serve them.

When I was 24, a wealthy Frenchman who made a fortune in Africa gave me an apartment “corresponding to my function of inspector of finances for all of France”. Then I was employed by Banque Rothschild. Baron Nathan Rothschild put it well: “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply.”

Those wise guys I was talking about, you know, who made me president, gave me millions, an apartment, etc. they are so mighty they got my main competitor, ex-PM Fillon to fall, because, he had been given a used jacket by a real friend. You get it? A USED jacket? By a friend? Me I got an apartment, a million dollar apartment, Donald, by a plutocrat I didn’t even know well… and no French media talked about it. You know why, Donald? Because my friends, ex and future employers, those other multibillionaires you love to despise, they control all, all the media, all the minds, all the public opinions. So they accused Fillon of corruption, and he was charged, but me, not a shred of suspicion. Like I violated campaign finance laws, because friends gave me free services , like giant arenas, well below market rates. The commission in charge? I nearly doubled the salary of the head of the commission, and, you know what? He said there was nothing there. That’s the Deep State, donald. But remember JFK. So play hero all you want, remember JFK.

Remember what Rothschild said, two centuries ago? Do you control the money supply Donald? No. My friends do, and they will employ me better in the future, me and my colleagues here, if I, and we, keep in place the International Order they own and control.

 

So go on, play hero Donald, you made your fortune, we have to make our own. Meanwhile we will describe you to all the losers and low lives who vote for us, as evil personified and the origin of what we secretly love and sustains us. It is what I call the “esprit de finesse” Donald. Yes, in France the truly wealthy pay no taxes, so is the law, they can own art, castles, factories, all above the law and taxation. Do you think the losers noticed? No. They are scraping by, fighting like pigeons about crumbs. We want to keep it that way. It’s subtle, Donald, subtle, it’s all about make-belief.

You are playing with fire, Donald. The losers and low lives are close to realizing they were completely had. That China was the greatest, latest tool to evade taxation, laws on work, human dignity, and prevent the losers and low lives to hold us hostages, we who have it all, by making useful work.

 

And you know how we do this Donald? With dignity, respect, we instill to the losers and low lives who vote for us and adore us, that the International Global order which transform quickly that assemblage of republics and democracies into a new world aristocracy, has to be respected and is full of dignity. Dignity, Donald, talk about dignity. Act as if it is all very noble, Donald!

Patrice Ayme

 

Trade Is Not Just About Bananas, But Mental Capability

Europe conquered the world, and the world of minds: the United Nations is little more than the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, writ large. How did Europe do that? By building superior intelligence, superior culture, superior mentality.

All things the Politically Correct Perfect Cretins claim don’t exist. Call them PC square.  

When a country C (for China) invests into another country U, U, for USA), C doesn’t just put money at the disposal of We The People of U.

That is what a ridiculous article in the New York Times, by a five-star economist from the Plutocratic Corruption claims, and exclusively focuses on… forgetting the most important point. (Politically Correct Perfect Cretins Perfect Corruption: PC Cube!)

And the point is military. I will develop it further in a companion essay (of an even more robust nature!)

This Trade Deficit is NOT just about money, far from it! It is about who is smarter in the future, it’s about who is a slave, in the future, it’s about who sells only bananas in the future, it’s about who has a future in the land of the free!

Reminder: battles decide the world. On the battlefield, or in the mental field. And trade is not just about money. The most important trading is about ideas, sentiments, culture, moods, mentalities.

Trade deficits can be good or bad, yes (as standard, Perfectly Corrupt economists, correctly observe). However, not all trades are equal. Selling bananas is not selling cars. A car has much more “added value” than a banana. Some of this “added value” involves knowledge. If one loses the ability of making high-tech products, one loses cognition and know-how. Selling bananas will not compensate for this dearth of mind and intellect brought by an imbalance in added value trade: one will become, irresistibly, the proverbial banana Republic.

For 6,000 years China has been the “Central State” (as China called itself), because of superior Chinese know-how (even in the Nineteenth Century, all what Britain could sell to China in exchange for advanced Chinese products was opium).

A deficit in added-value jobs will lead to a deficit in know-how. Ultimately, this becomes a question of national security deficit. The converse is true. This is why China maintains an enormous trade surplus in added value job products with the rest of the world. China was not born yesterday. The Perfectly Corrupt Political Cretins, though, were, and now relish their slavery at the hands of their masters, who have one foot in China, one foot on their faces, and they don’t get it yet.

The enormous trade imbalance with China enables major companies in the West to escape local Western laws, taxes and regulations by offshoring the work to China. This makes the owners of these companies, which are entangled with ownership of Western media, keen to defend that trade imbalance which makes them ever wealthier, and more influential politically, thus anchoring their domination. This fits China’s strategic purpose just fine.

A civilization which doesn’t maintain mental added value in the trade of ideas is doomed (by internal decomposition or external invasion, or both). So beware the nature of trade!

Patrice Ayme

Don’t Encourage “Politically Correct” Apartheid in the USA: it’s Racism!

Abstract: There is no US left, but there is a pseudo-left… whose job is to reinforce the plutocracy, mostly by diverting discourse and reflection towards completely ineffective pursuits. One of them is an obsession with the word “nigger”… Instead of obsessing about real reforms.

Racism is racism. Doesn’t matter the color of the skin of the racist.

***

A white student asks author Ta-Nehisi Coates if it’s “cool” to rap along to songs with the n-word in it – and Ta-Nehisi Coates responds brilliantly (say the Politically Correct). Bestselling author Ta-Nehisi Coates answers an audience question about the power and ownership of words at the Family Action Network event with Evanston Township High School while on tour for his newest book, WE WERE EIGHT YEARS IN POWER: An American Tragedy. (No, you were not. Obama may have had a Kenyan as a father, but, like many Kenyan servants of the white masters in racist English Kenya, he did obsequiously only what the white masters told him to do. The title of his book is pure disinformation serving the plutocracy!

(Unwittingly racist) Coates’ argument is that “every word doesn’t belong to everyone”. For example, he says, the USA belongs to the whites, and the blacks own, in exchange, Coates insists on that, the “n-word” (the word which means “black” in Latin, with an added g for emphasis). Give me the country, I will allow you one word! Fair? Coates says it’s fair, and he laughs! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO15S3WC9pg

Self-declared victim/businessman of racism makes the apology of racism? All blacks are his family, it’s not mine? Racists can’t fight racism with racism, and they know it, and they like it, as many turned racism itself into a business, business being the business of America…

Personally, as an undisputable victim of (anti-intellectual, and other) racism, I can’t approve of the apology of racism by Coates. The solution to racism is not more racism, but less. And cutting the crap about which type of people people are, and what peculiar rights they have, according to types.. Tribalization: “blacks” go with “blacks”, “whites” go with “whites”, Indians go with Indians, Muslims go with Muslims, Turks go with Turks, Hispanics go with Hispanics, Trump haters go with Trump haters, “Republicans” go with “Republicans”, etc. is just, literally, the apology of apartheid. Now, OK, I am myself partial on this subject, having no “racial” group to go to which view me as family and reciprocally. Maybe that’s why I always hated apartheid, and why racists enjoy, precisely, those race families they decided they have… The way to end racism against “blacks” in the US, is to require EFFECTIVE implementation of equal rights. No more, no less. So prison reform, sentence reform, justice reform, housing reform, educational reform should be resolved first. Focusing only on the usage of words by some versus others instead of focusing on the usage of LAWS is part of the mechanisms which prevent to even reflect at the needed reforms of the entire society.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/22/politics/jack-johnson-who-is/index.html

Trump just pardoned Jack Johnson, the black hyper famous world heavyweight boxing champ, condemned to prison, did time, and who had to flee the USA, because of his “crime against nature” (Federal prosecutor said at the time) of crossing state lines with his white girlfriend. Why did we have to wait for Trump? Because to many on the self declared “left” not so secretly promote apartheid? Getting Obama to pardon blacks was like extracting all his teeth… Although he had himself used the very substance they were condemned for, he readily admitted (even in his books!)

Racism is racism. Doesn’t matter the color of the skin of the racist. And it doesn’t matter the religion either: the Jews said, all too much, that they were the “Elected People“. The Nazis (some of them of dubious ancestry, by their own standards, for example Hitler, or notoriously in love with Jews, like Goebbels) begged to differ: THEY hijacked the Jewish supremacy ideology, and insisted that they were the “Elected People”! Much of the Jewish ideology of election (by “God”) and holocaust, as divinely found in the Bible, was then turned against the Jews themselves… Specifics can be evil, but embracing evil methods is even worse, because they can be then applied in many other circumstances, and they stay evil…

Patrice Ayme

FRANKS SURPASSED ROME Ice Cores Show (Fall of Rome XII)

Greenland Says: WHEN EUROPE WAS NAMED, EUROPE WAS SUPERIOR TO ANY STATE BEFORE EUROPE, INCLUDING ROME AND CHINA, IN IMPORTANT WAYS:

By the early Eighth Century, Europe, as the Franks named their empire, had risen above any civilization which came before, in some crucial dimensions (eat this, and choke, anti-European propagandists!) This is the darkest secret of the so-called “Dark Ages”. It flies into the astounding propaganda we have been exposed to regarding “Western” civilization. It was for philosophical reasons (many philosophical traditions, from Egypt, even Sumer, to Germany were entangled, and the Franks reorganized, and morphed them very heavily, it was not just a question of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, as the unimaginative parrots have it!)

Make no mistake: the established elite and its corrupt universities hate the full, deepest, correct history of Europe, because they hate reason.The only reasonable wise policy is to hate them in turn, just as president Franklin Roosevelt hated bankers (FDR said, adding that he “welcomed their hatred”).

***

Rise of Metallurgy, Rise of Civilization:

For 8,000 years, civilization has been propelled by ever better metallurgy. When the Conquistadors invaded Mesoamerica, they discovered that some of the nations had copper technology. Cortez’s crafty capitans taught the Natives to mass produce dozens of thousands of copper tipped bolts to use in Spanish crossbows against the Aztecs. Metallurgy enables superior war, but also superior agriculture: when their heavy iron plows were able to turn around the fat fields of Northern Europe, the well fed Franks grew and multiplied, and the center of civilization went north, where the water was..

Superior? How superior were the Greco-Romans? How superior were the Franks? A graph says it well. Ancient layers of ice in Greenland hold lead that originated at mines and foundries in ancient Greco-Roman and Frankish Europe. Fluctuations in the amount of ancient lead pollution that reached Greenland trace the economic impact of wars, plagues, and imperial expansion in Europe.

The legend below the graph is an interesting example of the INSANE ANTI-FRENCH BIAS found in Anglo-Saxon literature, and thinking, in all domains (even physics, see note). Indeed look at the stupid timeline below: instead of mentioning the Franks (who had an enormous empire), “Visigoths” and “Moors” are mentioned. The Visigoths had been confined to Spain by the Franks. The Franks had sprawled over most of the rest of Europe: MASSIVE FRANKISH SILVER PRODUCTION CAME FROM EASTERN EUROPEAN MINES, CONQUERED BY THE FRANKS! That’s what the graph should be all about, instead it focuses on Muslim raiders, the ISLAMIST STATE (“Moors”) and Visigoths (who controlled Spain very superficially as their prompt collapse when the “Moors” invaded, showed.
Details of the graph are analyzed in detail below.

What about China not showing up in Greenland lead? Well China had a dearth of metals problem. All this wood construction in the East happened for some reason. The massive Greco-Roman and Frankish architecture was in stone, but it often was anchored by metals. When the Amiens cathedral threatened to collapse like a rotting pumpkin, the Franks aka French, surrounded it by a giganormous iron belt: hydraulic hammers helped (many other cathedrals got the same treatment).  

The peak of silver mining by the Franks is so strong that it is also towering in ice cores extracted at Nevado Illimani in Bolivia, just east of La Paz, in the southern hemisphere…

Civilization has been much about metal in the last 8,000 years. Earliest work on lead and copper has been found in Mesopotamia and the Balkans. By 3,500 BCE bronze (a harder alloy of copper with 11% tin) had been discovered in the same area, and metals had spread to Portugal and Britain. Metals were also introduced into China by Europoid people. Metals provided with the most important superiority of all: military. 5,000 years ago, Egyptians gave the highest worth to “daggers from heavens” made of meteoric iron. In the last three millennia, it’s pretty much those with the best metals who won wars, and metals drove history (the Etruscans invaded Italy where they did to acquire control of iron mines; the Celts had the best steel metallurgy, and equipped the Roman army, from sword, the gladius hispaniensis, to “Gallic” helmets).

The classical world economy ran on lead. The Romans made extensive use of lead for water pipes (limestone deposits inside the pipes would quickly isolate toxic lead from the water). Lead was used all over “plumbing” (which means “leading”), weights, soldering clamps between ashlar blocks or columns in architectural construction, sheathing and ballasting the hulls of some ships, etc.

A problem China had was the dearth of precious metals. Not so in Europe. The Greco-Roman economy ran on silver: Roman currency was minted in silver coins, the denarii. When smelting silver, adding lead to the crushed ore helps concentrate the silver. High-temperature smelting at around 1,200 degrees Centigrades, along with the process of separating lead from silver after the fact, released a lot of lead into the air over Southern Europe during Roman times.

China had a precious metal problem. Under the Tang (7-9C) it was solved, sorta, by using paper currency (that collapsed after being abused by the Yuan in the 13C; Bolivian silver solved the problem later)

***

Icy Record:

Thus lead pollution provides a proxy for the GDP of the Roman economy. Now historians have an increasingly detailed record of changes in lead pollution levels from year to year, in the ice sheets of Northern Greenland. (The Northern Greenland Ice Core Project produced a 423-meter-long ice core.).

The core records nearly 2,000 years of annual ice buildup, from 1100 BCE to 800 CE. Each layer records slightly less than a year’s worth of accumulated ice, which traps other material, like lead from mines and foundries in Europe. Joseph McConnell of the publicly supported Desert Institute of Nevada and his colleagues have dated the layers with an uncertainty of just one or two years, enabling to see how historical events impacted lead pollution.

***

Warning: The Chinese Learn From European Superiority:

Before I get to the Frankish superiority graph, let me relate a recent observation: I was in the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, California, with the Google campus and headquarters all around. A group of Chinese scholars was there, with a particularly senior professor, with a cortege of full professor and student. The Chinese crowd stopped in front of the Antikythera mechanism, a Greek computer, 23 centuries old (mechanical computers reappeared with Blaise Pascal in 1642, then Leibniz 1673, and Bouchon (1725), Falçon (1728), Jacquard (1745).  

The senior professor turned towards all his entourage, and gave it a stern lecture on how much more the Greeks were than anybody else (including the Chinese). His audience, professors and students, listened religiously in rapt silence.

That’s the right attitude to improve civilization, now firmly embraced by China (and, hopefully, life-president Xi will concentrate on that, and let the West handle the rest…). Why Greece collapsed next is a philosophical problem: Aristotle (and Socrates, and Plato, and Isocrates, and especially a gigantic war Athens lost, etc.) destroyed democracy.

It’s a warning, because China may think the sky is the limit, and it’s not. It’s a warning because other nations have to remind China, and themselves that the sky is not the limit. Athens thought that even the sky was no limit (see Aristophanes’ “The Birds“). And the rest is history, not a pleasant one: Direct Democracy delayed 24 centuries and counting…

***

Greenland Lead Pollution Details, And How They Connect With Previously Known History:

Yes, Europe was more advanced, at least in metal production, around 750 CE, just after breaking the back of the Islamist empire of the Umayyads (the “Moors”!), is rich in important lessons.

The traces of lead in ancient layers of Arctic ice got there because, somewhere in Greater Europe, foundry were busy smelting ore. When other layers got free of metal pollution it was because those miners and foundry workers were suddenly dismissed, fleeing, fighting… or dead.

The ice cores correlate with wars throughout Greco-Roman and Frankish history. When conflict came to a mining region, as it did during the three Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, it disrupted life and work in the region. It shows up as a year or two of cleaner ice in Greenland, since the Mediterranean was producing less lead pollution.

At the outbreak of the first Punic War in 264 BCE, for instance, the amount of lead in the Greenland ice layers dropped abruptly: mining and smelting became secondary, war primary. But production ramped up again closer to the final years of the war: Carthage minted more silver coins to pay its huge mercenary forces (Roman forces didn’t need to be paid that much: they were drafted farmer-citizens).

Wartime drops in production were followed by a recovery at the end of the conflict, as people returned to work and started pumping lead into the atmosphere again. After the end of the Second Punic War in 206 BCE, Rome got control of Carthage’s mines in Spain: thus a sharp increase in the amount of lead pollution in the ice core from Greenland.

During the Crisis of the Roman Republic, a period of wars and threats thereof, from the late second to mid first century BCE, lead emissions from Europe stayed relatively low, while the economy was seriously disrupted. But as things stabilized, especially as Rome, led by “Augustus” conquered key mining areas in Northern Spain around 16 BCE, Europe began emitting steadily high amounts of lead that stained the distant ice.

Under Augustus and the early Julio-Claudian emperors, until 64 CE, silver denarii were made from effectively 100-percent silver bullion; and were made of new metal (not recycled). In 64 CE, Nero cut silver to 80 percent in the denarii. Moreover, Roman mints started recycling old coins to make new ones. We now know that technology was floundering, and the mines were decreasing output(“world is getting old”, the Romans would soon observe).

In 103-107 CE, under the enterprising Spanish general, now emperor, Trajan, the empire conquered Dacia, a vast territory in Eastern Europe, where silver mines were located. Trajan, as Julius Caesar before him, fully understood that the empire had to expand, or die. The empire briefly returned to producing coins from new metal again, and that coincides with a spike in lead pollution in Greenland’s ice.

In 165 CE a devastating pandemic struck the Empire (Marcus Aurelius would die from it 15 years later). We don’t know if it was smallpox or measles. The Romans called it the Antonine Plague. Several waves of outbreaks killed as many as five million people, before it finally burned itself out in 193 CE. The general anti-reason, anti-technological drift of the empire finally opened, under Marcus Aurelius, the door wide to multiple invasions by Germans and Sassanids. Disastrous policies by Commodus furthered the problem (he abandoned lands conquered by his father).  A Roman emperor and his son were actually killed in combat shortly thereafter, in 236 CE… a situation which had not happened for 350 years, since the Cimbrian-Teutones war (when Consuls were killed in combat, and, or their armies annihilated).

However this time there was no further conquest (although there were reconquests under Constantine). Metal production entered an irreversible decline.

When the war against the Islamist State became total  in 663 CE, Roman emperor Constans II visited the city of Rome for 12 days.  Constans infuriated the entire population by stripping everything of value to fund war against the Muslims. The roofs of Rome were covered in extremely valuable metal, which could be sold, or used to make weapons with (even the bronze roof of the Pantheon was stripped).

All in vain: a jealous God, Allahu Akbar! Struck and the fleet carrying most of the metal sank on its way back to Constantinople).

***

Why Did The Lead Production Collapse Again After 800 CE? Total War! Vikings! Avars! Muslims!

In 800 CE, the Pope surprised Charlemagne by proclaiming him THE ROMAN emperor (a sacrosanct notion inherited from Roman Tribunes of the People), one and only. Constantinople, then under a regency, reluctantly agreed. Charlemagne reacted as if all this was an unwelcome distraction. There was a good reason for this, after 30 years of continual, total war against the Saxons, trying to finish what emperor Augustus had advised his successors not to finish. The Franks, correctly esteemed that ALL of Germany had to be conquered, anything else was not military viable. However, to their dismay, the Franks were finding out that there was a “Danish” problem.

Since 793 CE, when the Northmen attacked the Northumbrian coast, the British philosopher Alkuin, his PM, and tutor to his children, had tried to incite Charlemagne to do something about the Vikings. The Viking problem was related to the Saxon problem: Charlemagne had submitted the latter, and “Christianized” them (in the Frankish meaning of Christianism, which the Popes hated until Charlemagne freed them from the Lombards, and then gave them territory). In 799 CE a dismayed Charlemagne had learned the first Viking raid at Noirmoutiers. This was part of a full blown war between Denmark and Francia (all Vikings were then called “Danes”), a continuation of the war against the Saxons (just won by then, after 850 years, starting with Julius Caesar!)

The Ninth Century became a century of total war, throughout the “RENOVATED ROMAN EMPIRE” (Renovation Imperium Romanorum) a combination of internal civil war between Franks, and invasions of the barbarians attracted by the riches of the empire. In 846 CE, the Muslims sieged Rome, burned the Vatican, before being thrown out by a Frankish rescue army.

The lead economy collapsed.

There is such a thing as a war economy, it doesn’t need money, when sufficiently violent. The war within the Roman/Carolingian empire, in the 9th and 10th century were terrible. The devastation, immense. In some battles (Fontenoy) up to 50,000 were killed in a few hours, a carnage not even viewed in modern times. Chronic Muslim raids haunted, all the way to Switzerland! Throwing the Muslims out of Provence required a combined operation of the Frankish army and the fire spitting Roman Navy from Constantinople.

In a war economy, you don’t need money, just weapons, and then you can bark out orders to civilians. Death, if they don’t obey swiftly. (This is the sort of “collaboration” the Nazis extracted from the countries they had invaded…)

The dust would settle in the Tenth Century: Francia subjugated the Northmen, Scandinavia embraced “Christianism”. However, infuriated by the incompetence of the “Roman” empire, which had failed, for decades to subjugate the Northmen, although Frankish military power was great enough to do so, Francia elected her own king/emperor, and refused to participate in the election of the “Roman” emperor (that had also to do with the rise of the francized Saxons). Now equipped with her own king/emperor, West Francia exploded in 60 states (just as many as Caesar had found, a millennium earlier). By 950 CE, the Saxons had turned into perfect Franks and their “Roman” emperor Otto I, finally destroyed the Steppe men, the Avars. Soon the Normans and the Angevins would reconquer the Mediterranean islands from the Muslims, and Southern Italy.

By the Eleventh Century, the lead economy of Europe had recovered, and a full Renaissance had started again, this time to stay (the famous Renaissance of the 16C and the Enlightenment of the 18C were just further episodes of what was started in the 11C.. Although the resistance of the Catholic fanatics grew proportionally to progress of civilization! Meaning lots of wars, torture, inquisition, etc.)

***

Not All Pollution Is Unsustainably Bad, Civilization Itself Is A Pollution!

The demonstration of European superiority is not just in the “soft power” of the queen of the Franks outlawing slavery in the enormous empire, or in forcing religious establishments to provide universal free secular education. The proof of the astounding activity of the Franks as shown by the Greenland ice cores

And it was all blown away by war. At least, for two centuries.

The ice cores show that the Franks were much smarter than the Romans: when a worse ecological crisis started in the late Twelfth Century (from an overly large population, and the first cooling of the Little Ice Age), political leaders took the right decisions.

One reason why history doesn’t always repeat itself is that sometimes, one has learned from it.

Patrice Ayme

I Am the Planet of the Apes

Yes I am! An Ape! And you know what, I escaped from Africa! It’s absolutely true! I don’t mean my ancestors, three millions years ago, I mean I grew up there, mostly in Subsaharan Africa (and no, it was not in racist white supremacist Kenya, Rhodesia or South Africa; and yes, the first time I came across Anglo-Saxon racism in Subsaharan Africa, I was shocked to the point of complete incomprehension…) My father was born in Africa too… My African cultural heritage is a big part of my philosophical personality, not far removed from my cannibalistic ancestors, and absolutely skeptical of Euro-American superiority.

So there is a huge fight because of someone called Barr, an entertainer I have never watched or heard, who wrote a tweet in which she claimed that Valerie Jarrett, like the rest of the genus Homo, may have to do with the Apes. Actually we are all living on the Planet of the Apes, and myself and I, first of all. While growing in Africa as a child, I was actually enlightened enough to nickname myself after the word for baboon in the local language. (Since then, I got worse.)

Racist people say that, of the two above, one is white, the other is black… Or “African-American”, if they want to sound learned… I am African-Something, because I grew up in Africa, for real. The two multimillionaires above are just US citizens, part of the .1% leading the planet astray… Only an obsessive anti-African racist will see a black skin where there is none…

Seeing a black skin where there is none is similar to the Nazis seeing “Jewishness” where only them could see it, so lethally obsessed they were by the notion… By the way, that was not much different from sexual serial killers: one of the main Nazis (and Hitler’s official successor), Goebbels, was besides himself because a Jewish girl, that he assiduously courted for a very long time… ended up firmly rejecting him… the lame degenerate… Then, naturally enough for a degenerate, he wanted to kill them all… (But don’t worry, he married an even bigger degenerate who ended up killing all her children, although they didn’t want to die…)

What is an Ape? Us! (Except for the Obama entourage so degenerate they shouldn’t perhaps be honored by that title?) Here is Wikipedia: “Apes (Hominoidea) are a branch of Old World tailless anthropoid primates native to Africa and Southeast Asia. They are the sister group of the Old World monkeys, together forming the catarrhine clade. They are distinguished from other primates by a wider degree of freedom of motion at the shoulder joint as evolved by the influence of brachiation.

In traditional and non-scientific use, the term “ape” excludes humans, and is thus not equivalent to the scientific taxon Hominoidea. There are two extant branches of the superfamily Hominoidea: the gibbons, or lesser apes; and the hominids, or great apes.”

Well, the problem with traditional thinking is that it is closer to the Apes in the traditional sense, precisely. When there is a choice, I always opt for the correct usage, the scientific usage. The scientific usage is just common sense boosted by careful consideration. … For example look at the picture of Barr and Jarrett. Who is the “black” one? Their skin color is roughly the same! Only Americans trained in the science of US racism would point unhesitatingly at Jarrett. 

In Africa, or the rest of the world not inculcated with racist US ways, people would scoff, resent, despise and condemn the racist question, and its context, finally retorting, as genuine Africans would, that obviously both are white, what’s wrong with your color vision?

Who this Jarrett anyway? Her maternal grandfather Robert Rochon Taylor was on the board of the Chicago Housing Authority, her mother was at a plutocratically funded and founded institute for child development, etc. Her father headed a hospital in Shiraz, Iran (was that CIA connected? The mind reels with possibilities, the CIA being in the habit of financing with its secret budget endeavors all over the world. Another habit? Trust the inside job, the children of the secret society…)

When Obama became US Senator in what many view as a rigged election, Jarrett gave Obama Michelle a 300 K + job at the helm of the University of Chicago Hospital (where Barack was teaching). Here is an extract of the sort of services Michelle provided with:

….“The Washington Post published one of those loaded connect the dot stories tracing the Obama campaign’s ties to the University of Chicago Medical Center, one of Chicago’s premier teaching hospitals. The Post reported that, with the help of Michelle Obama, its vice president of community and external relations (now on leave), the big, 600-bed hospital embarked on a project to move poor people out of the hospital’s emergency department and into care in the community.

Ms. Obama helped create the hospital’s Urban Health Initiative, which aimed to redirect non-critical emergency room visitors to neighborhood community clinics. That, in turn, would free up space for well-insured patients with more complicated medical cases, who might need some of the expensive services….”

Days after 9/11, Bush, in an act reminiscent of high treason of civilization, and certainly in a testimony of an inability to read the whole rather than the part, erupted with the usual fascist lethal religion apology: “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith.  And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that.

The English translation is not as eloquent as the original Arabic, but let me quote from the Koran, itself:  In the long run, evil in the extreme will be the end of those who do evil. For that they rejected the signs of Allah and held them up to ridicule.”

The incriminated tweet…

Singing the praises of Islam, when Islam “subjugated” (Islam means subjugated) the Middle east and North Africa, making these regions, long the world’s richest, into the poorest, is actually… racist (because it means the population of these regions shall stay enslaved: skeptics can contemplate not just Syria, but Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, even Chechnya, maybe Indonesia, and certainly yesterday’s Malaysia, where Islam is used as a convenient excuse for dictatorship).

After Obama became president, we were treated to more of the same singing, praising Islam, and turning that superstition into civilization. It should have been said that, just as Catholicism in 1600 CE, Islamism is a terrorist religion: it is just a matter of reading the fundamental texts, the Qur’an (kill and torture all sorts of people) and the Hadith (kill the Jews). Instead the self-destroying mantra of pseudo-intellectual French sinkers: fearing Islam is racist… whereas the historically amply justified fear of Catholicism (which killed millions in France alone), is now considered, illogically, not racist! So France is sinking rather than thinking!

If one made the apology of Catholicism, as practiced in the Fourth and Fifth Century of the present era by the Roman State, or in Western Europe , for seven centuries after 1026 CE, one would be a traitor to civilization: Catholicism was truly an abominable, lethal, torturous faith. Now it has been pacified, or nearly so, it just molest little children (all bishops of Chili just resigned because they were partaking in child molestation, either practicing it, or collaborating with it, and a cardinal, third in the Vatican hierarchy of divinity is n trial in Australia for the same sort of charges: after 1026 CE, precisely, Catholicism was taken over by homosexuals with pedosexual criminal tendencies…)

One becomes more civilized by learning to reason better: that means, better logic, better facts, more integrity. Valerie Jarrett is entirely part of the samp in Washington: while advising Obama how to navigate (one of her jobs was at “Navigant”!) she had several private employments, including as a lobbyist (see “Open Secrets”).

Valerie Jarrett is a white woman who sucks Islamist oil, and the entire biosphere, comparing her to an ape gravely insult simians, as it omits the fatal impact such creatures from hell have on life on Earth. Let’s enquire on individuals like that. How come they rule? How they rule?

Meanwhile, I shall stay an irate ape.

And proud of it.

Let the Internet robots out there, short-circuit about that, while Jarrett’s friends plug them on.

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: Some are sure to say that I don’t get it: if it is perceived as racist, it is racist. In other words what matters is not reality, but someone’s perception of it. Let’s call that “subjectivism”. Subjectivism is always practiced by tyrannical, bloody minded oligarchies: that’s how they occupy the high moral ground. For example the Nazis viewed themselves as oppressed victims (Versailles, Sudeten, Danzig, invasion by the usual suspects: Jews, Poles and the French, etc.). The Nazis’ main discourse was all about that imaginary victimhood (in the largest, strongest, richest country in Europe).

So I get it perfectly: I look at fact: if a skin is white, it’s white. If some American has nothing to do with Africa, that’s an American, not an African, and so on. As said by someone who has good ground to claim Africa.

Note 2: Skin color is a touchy subject in Africa. Depicting someone by skin color is viewed as racist. And all the more so, if the label is incorrectly applied. Africans are not “black” (and actually most Africans are NOT black!), they are “Africans”.

Note 3: Does my savage way of thinking have anything to do with West Africa? It sure does, and proud of it! Living in Africa forces a much wider spectrum of experiences than on the average Earth denizen. And that’s excellent.