GROUP Selection, Not Selection Of THE Fittest

Groups cannot be avoided, when considering human evolution and selection, because humans always lived in groups: WE EVOLVED FROM GROUPS, AS GROUPS.

Many intellectuals believe that there was an original Eve, and Adam, and we all come down from them. This is a variant of the Celebrity Cult, in this case the indispensable first couples, from which the concept of fist couples emanates (in the clouded minds of the conventional establishment members). For example Yuval Harari, an historian with scientific spirit pretense, but falling short from the deliberate naivety which makes him so attractive to plutocracy, says in his famous book “Sapiens” that at some point a female ape had two daughters. The descendants of one of them are us, the other, the chimps.

This is, most probably, false. And that it is false matters a lot, philosophically speaking, as I will thereafter show.[1]

Why?

Selection of the fittest works best with bacteria, and maybe only with them. It can’t work much with humans. Humans evolve very fast, precisely because they are apt and inclined to go colonize the weirdest environments, each of them a new ecological niche. In the last 300,000 years, many human species still existed. At least three, with interbreeding capabilities, Denisovans, Neanderthals, and African Sapiens, contributed to our (rather mixed!) ancestry.   

Hominidae from the superfamily Hominoidea (“Apes”) are so highly social that they cannot long survive without the group (even Orangutans live in groups, supermales communicating with following females located miles away, thanks to their booming voice). Thus, picture this: a female has two daughters, A and B. However their descendants then interbreed with other members of the group and back with each others’ descendants: thus descendancy then becomes an entangled network. Two groups in intergenic relations will then appeared as two entangled super networkd with attractors (in the differential topological sense). And so on. Physical separation of human groups (for whichever reason: natural disaster, emigration, etc.) will then congeal increasingly different genetics. At no point, though, will there be a single Adam and Eve couple. Physical separation is easily obtained, as human beings ecological load is so heavy that it forces separation, lest everybody starves.

In the drawing above, one can see arrows going back and forth. This means that Chimps and Australopithecines would have kept breeding back and forth, even after the two groups separated. There is indeed evidence that the initial separation was around ten million years ago, but there was some interbreeding around six million years ago.

Adam and Eve? That’s good for the Bible. (Some are still all too inspired by the Bible!)

Notice that selection of a fitter group is rather then partly a question of colonizing a new ecological niche, and fitting to it genetically. Once again, we see that colonization promoted the evolution of humanity. One needs a particular mentality to go colonize. There is no doubt it became part of human ethology.

Aside from the latest philosophical point, some may sneer that even Darwin mentioned group selection (although he preferred individual selection), so the preceding is nothing new. Elaborated mathematical arguments have appeared, and made super-stars. However, recently, there was serious push-back. [2]

The advantage of my argument above is that it is as simple as it gets: mutation, in one individual, would immediately spread back to the group. Or a subset of the group. So subsets of groups of individuals evolve, only them can evolve, into separated genomes… because of the addition of other factors (like physical separation).

Group selection is entangled with individual selection. Let’s take an example from my own theory of the quasi-extinction of Neanderthals: I argued that, inside a group, individuals with more Neanderthal genetic material would be harder to reproduce during quasi-extinction events: Neanderthals had much more muscle mass, and also 10% more brains.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/neanderthal-superiority/

The more massive Neanderthal brain, at rest, would, all by itself, augment caloric needs by nearly 3%. So more Neanderthalized children, in a group of individuals of mixed genetics, would be harder to feed, and would have poorer health… hence would tend to survive less.

So, progressively, non-obviously very advantageous Neanderthal genes would tend to disappear… But the evolution would be in the group, by the group.

See my: Math Extinguished Neanderthals:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/why-did-neanderthals-disappear/

We were not just born altruistically, we were born from altruism, from groups… And from the desire, the will to power and discovery, to find new ecological niches, out of which groups, species are born… Now all over the Solar System, and, soon enough, the entire galaxy…

The same happens with the evolution of ideas: although the initial idea will arise in just one individual, it amounts to nothing, if not transferred to a group. And, once transferred to the group, it is often transmogrified into something else, again to be transmuted by some more individuals therein.

Last, but not least: last month the fact that Quantum Jumps are complex phenomena was demonstrated; there is a warning over the Quantum system, before a Quantum Jump occurs. This opens various “Sub Quantum” (to use my semantics) perspectives, including controlling Quantum processes. Could something similar happen with evolution? Could we control it? Of course. Artificial selection has been known for many millennia. Ancient Greece was practicing it deliberately, mixing artificial and natural selection to evolve new phenotypes, which were then sold all over the ancient world for lots of money (genetic engineering is not new).

The way then biological evolution was naturally occuring was through ecological niches. Same for the evolution of ideas, or moods, emotions: mental niches will engineer mental creativity. This is the best, deepest, most human reason to foster diversity. Not just diversity of skin, but diversity of mind, opinion, sentiment, mood, ideas. As basic internet services are turned into public utilities (part of E. Warren’s program), one has to keep this as the most important principle.

Patrice Ayme…

***

***

[1]: Harari, is a Oxford PhD historian, philosopher and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow… I wish I had the time to rewrite his books, the right way… (They are like Patrice lite and like, yet, all too often, wrong; however better read that than nothing… Some Plutos I know swear by the book; they are careful not to read what I write; whereas Harari buttresses conventional thinking, thus is very good. For example, Adam and Eve, thus the Bible…)

***

[2] Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, the “father of sociobiology” and a world-expert on ant colonies, was one of the pillars of 20 C view of evolution, has argued that “multi-level selection”—essentially a modern version of group selection, and what is implicit in my Neanderthal decrease theory—is the best way to understand social evolution. In his earlier work, Wilson was a staunch defender of kin selection, but no longer; he has recently penned sharp critiques of the reigning kin selection orthodoxy.

Richard Dawkins, of the infamous “selfish gene” and “meme” concepts, says that Wilson is “just wrong” about kin selection and that his most recent book contains “pervasive theoretical errors.”  Once again, the argument above is too simple for that: groups cannot be avoided, when considering human evolution and selection, because humans always lived in groups: WE EVOLVED FROM GROUPS, AS GROUPS. It’s what’s called in mathematics a counter-example: a simple case which brings down an over-simplistic, thus erroneous theory. 

Dawkins brandished the example of (European) red squirrels being outcompeted in Britain by (American!) grey squirrels. Indeed, this is not a case of genuine group selection, as the success of one group and the decline of another is a side-effect of individual level selection. This has nothing to do with the argument here, as the two species of squirrels don’t interbreed…

***

The Age Of War Is Coming. (In Part Courtesy US Oil.)

Yes, Earth’s climate is changing a little bit. Soon it will change enormously, and at a torrid pace. US politicians and their “Democratic” and “Republican” followers are mostly to blame: while North Americans and Australians emit more than 20 tons of CO2 per person, per year, a country such as France makes do with 4 tons (and the UK has collapsed it emissions, down to 6.5 tons now). Listen to the “Democratic” candidates: even the supposedly “anti-war” Tulsi Gabbard from Hawai’i (an intense fossil fuel state), already rejects the responsibility on other powers about doing something against climate change. Says pretty Tulsi:”The United States alone can’t accomplish this“. (Supreme hypocrisy: most of the CO2 crisis was originated in the USA!)

US led inaction is really a splendid spectacle: Trump is rightly accused, however the excellently disguised Obama did the heavy lifting, to further the CO2 production, by pushing for massive fracking (“bridge fuel to the future” he called it). Now the US is back to its usual position of world’s first producer of fossil fuels.

So the climate will change further… and will become ever more favorable to war.  

***

Parthia came out of nowhere, a small kingdom SE of the Caspian Sea. it invaded the Greco-Roman world gigantically. As with Scythia, just north, the Romans proved unable to address the problem. That can be directly traced to the assassination of Julius Caesar. Caesar was ready to kill both empires in one fell swoop. Instead, after his assassination, his army, the best Rome ever had, turned against itself and against the Roman Republic, ultimately pushing Caesar’s great nephew and adoptive son to become “First Man” (Princeps)

In history, there are calm periods, and periods when all hell breaks loose:

So it was between Romans and the Sassanids (Persia). War would erupt, often because the Sassanids wanted Rome out of Mesopotamia. “Mesopotamia” means between the streams, the Euphrates and the Tigris.  

Historically, monstrous Achaemenid Persia had lurched west, conquering Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Black Sea area, Athens resisted, and defeated the Persian at Marathon (while Sparta played). Something we celebrate to this day. Athens then tried to free Egypt, but was ultimately defeated by Sparta as the hand of Persia (which financed the Spartan fleet). So much for Persia always being innocuous. With its accomplice racist, enslaving, human rights abuser Sparta, Persian plutocracy smashed Direct Democracy durably, for millennia to come (and counting!)

Alexander and his father subdued Greece. That happened only because a resentful Sparta stayed out of the crucial battle. After nine  hours of combat, a charge of Alexander and his cavalry against Thebes’ Sacred Band gave the victory to the Macedonians. Thebes was eradicated, Athens was preserved, and then Alexander destroyed the Persians, going all the way to Afghanistan, India. He had to give up on visiting the Pacific.

Hellenistic successor regimes of Alexander’s empire were in turn defeated by the Parthians, who appeared in the south east corner of the Caspian Sea.

The Parthians exerted military pressure on Rome. From the Greco-Roman point of view, those were invaders of the multi-civilizational Seleucids, successor to Alexander. Julius Caesar was on his last day before going to crush them, when he was assassinated (obviously why he didn’t expect the treachery).

By 224 CE, the Sassanids in turn replaced the Parthians. The Sassanids invaded Armenia, Syria, etc. Rome counterattacked, a Roman emperor was made prisoner…

***

Under Shah Abbas, Iran controlled both sides of the Straits of Hormuz. That didn’t last, but the memory of it perdures… like that of Ottoman control of much of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And, as far as the contributions… the 1001 nights were written in Paris, and the Ottoman made printing unlawful. Right, Francois I of France would send printers to the fire, too, but that didn’t last…

Back to the Present, No Nukes Enforced:

In history, there are calm periods, and periods when all hell breaks loose. Wars between Romans and various Persian empires were separated by periods of calm after major wars.

It’s mechanical: combatants are exhausted, peace treaties are signed, causes of war disappear.

We are entering an age where billions of people, because of climate change, will become refugees. Last time this happened, the climate was also changing for the worse, and the Huns were exerting pressure in the back of all German nations, which tried to flee to within the Roman empire. Gigantic pressure on the Roman border resulted in a breakdown and invasions which destroyed the empire (and much of its economy and population; for example the Vandals invaded and occupied Africa, cutting Rome’s grain supply).

What to do in such a case? The Romans should have projected military force outside of the empire in a timely manner. This is exactly what the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius was doing, when he died (still relatively young). Marcus wanted to create two new Roman provinces, to act as buffer, and domesticate the savage, all too numerous Germans. As Caesar or Augustus, he understood that war was best, far away.

The order of the world cannot stand too many countries with nuclear weapons. Iran is going to find out that even Russia and China understand this (let alone Japan and the EU). There are already too many countries with nuclear weapons. Iranians say they have a right to them too. But those who, in the area, know long term history, will reject that. More than once the Persian Gulf was Persian all around, indeed.   

No nukes?

Yes.

Yes, it will require some efforts. And, by definition, efforts are not always nice. It’s not just a matter of arguing for world government a la Einstein, shooting the breeze, looking good. We have world government. It’s called the UNSC. It’s just a bit messy, right. But better that, than the alternative. Only one way.

No nukes.

Yes.

Patrice Ayme

 

US “Unsuccessful” Wars Are Actually Smart and Performing As Planned

Warning added after getting angry comments on the following essay: the essay below tends to enrage self-proclaimed “liberals”, “progressives”, and mutually declared “democrats”. I know why: basically the essay observes that those poor souls have been so incredibly manipulated that they believe what the establishment wanted them to believe, all the way down to their beating hearts. What credulity was that? The establishment persuaded their naive followers that sometimes the US “got bogged down in war”… when that was actually the plan!

And let me insist: it’s not because I am describing a maneuver of sumptuous Machiavellianism… that I approve of it.

***

One silly notion is that of the US conducting “unsuccessful wars”. Like which one was “unsuccessful”? The one against the Indians, eradicating them all? Oops, so sorry we killed you all, but thanks for the continent? Was that unsuccessful? Vietnam? The  US is now, de facto, allied to Vietnam (against you know whom). The war against Iraq from 1990 to 2003? Why would the war have been unsuccessful in Iraq, from the US point of view? Because the Iraqis don’t sell enough oil and gas to make US frackers grossly unprofitable? Quite the opposite, obviously! Afghanistan? Keep your enemies closer and in a state of complete degeneracy, test ever more sophisticated weaponry in real war conditions… How unsuccessful is that?

Contrarily to legend, the USA, as a nation is exactly where it wants to be, militarily. Economically, Trump is forcing US plutocrats out of China. Slowly, but surely. That’s also strategic. We don’t want this below to happen again… This time without back-up! (The US was the backup of France, everybody knew it in France in 1940… Although German and French fascists may have hoped, due to US careful designed “isolationism”, that time, the world war of 1939, was going to be different… )

This French B1 tank was destroyed by its crew (so it would be useless to the Nazis). May 1940

In 1936, France did a huge mistake: instead of going to war in Spain, as the Republic there, attacked by the Nazis (and Spanish and italian fascists), had requested, France listened to the perfidic Anglo-Saxon plutocracy from London and Washington… who had ordered France to stand down. Thus, after all, France, led by the Jewish Socialist PM Blum, didn’t intervene.

Consequence: in the week following May 10, 1940, it turned out that the vastly superior Franco-British forces didn’t function correctly, in part because of a number of relatively small, easy to correct, problems the French and British military were unaware of (no radio in tanks, no communications with air forces, no combat-trained pilots… and the surprise of having an enemy on speed, methamphetamines, who never slept).

By the time the French and British military adjusted to the reality of combat in 1940, a week later, 70 crack French divisions were encircled, cut out of supplies, France and Britain had lost the battle of France.

Morality: When confronted by enemies, it’s better to fight them, than ignore them. If nothing else, it keeps the training up, prevents surprises like May 1940. If France had intervened in Spain in 1936, maybe an unending low key war with Nazism would have started. It would have been better than the alternative…. A Holocaust (100 million killed, about 5% of world population), followed by the so-called “American Century”… we are more in the “American Century” than ever. Whereas France and Britain were allied and competitors of the USA in 1940, now they are just the US little helpers.

So what is next in strategy? Strategy is what decides the world, after all. Most of the French hated the Nazis, until the end of June 1940. After that, though, confronted to two million Nazi soldiers residing in France, they had to show respect. While the Nazis (and their US plutocrat helpers) killed 50 million Europeans, the US Deep State chuckled.

After the Macedonians occupied Athens, having defeated her in war, they established a plutocracy, which, arguably, lasted thousands of years. Things would have been completely different, Direct Democracy would have survived, had Athens not lost these two naval battles.

The USA understands now that it better be allied to France: the stakes have got much higher. Great, or Little Britain is not dependable anymore: watch the ridiculous Brexit. Germany, Japan are still trying to figure out what it all means, and how dependable they themselves are… Not that France doesn’t have a few things to figure out, either.  Like the USA, it may soon discover globalization was not a friend: whereas France is number one military power in Africa, it’s only seventh in trade… In other words, the French… and the Americans… are protecting increasingly Chinese interests in Africa… How strategic is that. By the way, I am pro-Chinese, my daughter is studying Chinese since pre-K.

But I also know that messes of contradictory entanglements bring war.

Take Iran: a fascist theocratic state, which provides Europe with energy. And a state where even the secular population believes it should have nukes. That will not happen: at the next attack against tankers, especially if Iran renounces the nuclear accord of 2015 with Obama (and four other nations, including UNSC permanent members), there will be a military strike.

But remember 1936: sometimes, a little military act goes a long way, a bit like a vaccine…

Conclusion:

The US did NOT get “bogged down” in ANY war since 1776 CE. Quite the opposite: all those wars boosted US power ever more. [1]

The only existential crisis was earlier, when Jamestown came close to extinction after 1610 CE. By 1625 CE, when tobacco started to bring revenue, thanks to newly introduced slavery and addiction (in Europe), it was clear sailing.

France got seriously bogged down in war with Germany, from around 1750 CE until not just 1945, but arguably, to this day (very low key now, as Germany has a regime similar to France, now)… Although some the roots of the Franco-German go back to the Fifth Century… or even Julius Caesar

France had to militarily confront the Nazis in 1936. Or then, much less favorably, go fight them alone with Czechoslovakia as only Ally, in 1938. In both cases, US plutocrats, who wanted Nazism to grow into a Franco-British destruction machine, successfully manipulated the French to dissuade them to declare war…

It is in the best interest of the US Wall Street-Petrodollar-Fracking establishment to shut down the Persian Gulf, and then to have it re-open thanks to the heroic efforts of the Americano-Franco-British military… Japan and others will have to be grateful…

Cynical plans don’t stop there. The self-sufficiency of the US in fossil fuel, and now even exportation, was not a Trump realization, but the work of Obama and his National Security Adviser, Susan Rice (who was personally invested). At this point, the CO2 crisis is carefully groomed as an other cause of delightful (in the sense of increased US power) wars to come. [2]

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] As “power” is revered in the USA, this observation of mine, that US wars were profitable to the USA, is enough to enrage the pseudo-liberals, pseudo-progressives. Indeed, if I am right, they are wrong (at least, wrong as seen from the perspective of in their own minds). What is going on here? Listen to Tulsi Gabbard, four term Congresswoman from Hawaii who served years in the US military, and tried to help Assad. She poses as “anti-war”. However, she is FOR… handguns. In other words, she is all for US citizens killing each other: power at its best. She sees nothing wrong, intrinsically, with great wealth, either: cult of power again.  So, if you tell these people wars increased US power, they hate you, because they are supposed to hate war, but also to revere the US (hence its power).

***

[2] The US is in the best position to maximize the crisis of the biosphere… and maximize the profits it will bring. That’s the plan. Obviously, most US citizens know this, intuitively, with their 20 tons of Co2 per capita, per year, and know enough to know that they shouldn’t know more. So they focus on Trump’s hairdo, and Trump’s tweets.

BERATING VIOLENCE DOESN’T HEAVENS BRING

BERATING ALL And ANY VIOLENCE IS BERATING ALL And ANY MEANS OF POWERFUL ACTION AGAINST INFAMY, HENCE DEEPLY INHUMAN:

Violating truth can’t bring good, except when there is no hope. Denying the reality, the inevitability of violence, the essence of Homo, is, at best, a manipulation, at worst the death of any hope of improving matters significantly.

Let me try to explain the pitfall of claiming that violence will stop, if we just stop thinking about it. Quite the opposite.

We are witnessing the greatest violence against the biosphere in 66 million years. And we are culprit, down to baby diapers and poisonous elements in electric batteries. How did we come to that?

Violence actually characterizes the genus Homo’s activities. Turning a wild planet into one’s own garden… required some considerable violence in one’s gardening….

“One must cultivate one’s garden”, said Voltaire, naively enough (until one realizes he was Louis XV’s boyfriend… at which point his advice takes a sinister, self-serving aspect, contemplate his castle, his private hotel on the Seine, facing Notre Dame). Diabolical enough an advice, my dear Voltaire: we are cultivating the garden to death. Tricky herbicides such as glyphosate, used on much of the planet, don’t just kill herbs, they kill soils, for ever, and even the plants malefic scientists have engineered to resist them will ultimately die from impoverished soil.

***

Sade Was A Genius, And A Saint, Sartre Was A Fool, And A Collabo: 

Sade, of course, spent most of his life in prison, sent there first by Louis XVI’s monarchy and then Napoleon’s tyranny… meanwhile saving thousands during the Revolution. Sade saved even his most vicious personal enemy’s life during the Revolution, because he had thought in depth about the nature of human violence, and thus, knew how to resist it. 

Jean-Paul Sartre was viewed by many, or, at least, the French, as a master thinker. He didn’t spend one day in prison: the authorities always viewed him as their friend, and he was. De Gaulle, idiotically enough said, speaking of Sartre:”One doesn’t jail Voltaire!” Hey, mon general, precisely, one imprisons Voltaire! Sartre was not jailed, precisely because he was a collabo….

Sartre wrote:

« La violence, sous quelque forme qu’elle se manifeste, est un échec. »

(“Violence, in whatever form it manifests itself, is a failure.”) This is viewed as one of Sartre’s master ideas… Master thinkers should utter master ideas they created themselves. Nevermind that, wherever we look at the planet, we see invaders who successfully colonized. Even in Greenland, the present inhabitants annihilated the preceding ones… who used to trade with the Vikings, all the way to extreme North Greenland (so the present “native” Greenlanders” replaced in the last 6 centuries both types of preceding inhabitants…)  It goes without saying that colonization, and especially invasion, is pretty violent…

Amusingly, this astoundingly stupid statement of Sartre is not original, being a 2,000 years old leitmotif of Christianism. One could even view the idea of violence as failure as the master idea of christianism: god is crucified, because god doesn’t want to use violence against His persecutors. So we see, just here, that Sartre, and his admirers, far from being revolutionary, are just plain old Christian, serving us the same old same old, without super hero god attached.

An Internet outlet called Cohérence loved Sartre do-goodism and tweeted it:

“Violence, in whatever form it manifests itself, is a failure.”

Jacques Attali , a friend of mine, and a famous adviser to many a major statesman and institutions in Europe sharply criticized the notion:  “Ah? Et la résistance contre les nazis, ce fut un échec ? Il est vrai que Jean-Paul Sartre fut largement absent de ce combat là. Quoiqu’en disent ses thuriféraires.” (Ah? And the resistance against the Nazis was a failure, was it a failure? It’s true that Sartre was mostly absent from that fight. Whatever his sycophants say.”

To kill Nazism, one killed 5.5 million Nazi soldiers, in the Wehrmacht alone. Helpers, not just in Gestapo, Polizei, but also from millions of collaborating troop also had to be killed with the entire German economy, which was so militarized Nazis had to steal most French output.

Humanity is all about violence. Hydroelectricity is generally viewed as “green”, “sustainable” power. In truth it causes enormous, hyper violent damage on the planet hydraulics. Contemplate the picture above. For scale, the dam wall is 221 meters tall (726’). It can release an astounding 11,000 tons of water, per second… More massive than the Eiffel tower… at a speed of 70 meters per second (200 kilometer an hour).

Here, have it in French, Sartre: La réussite, de quelque manière qu’elle se manifeste, est une forme de violence à l’égard de certaines formes pré-existantes. Refuser la violence sous toutes ses formes, c’est refuser l’humanité. Et donc pourquoi les dictatures demandent des moutons, pour achever leur inhumanité. Shortened translation: Success, however its nature, is violence against pre-existing forms. To reject violence under all and any form, it’s to reject humanity. 

***

Denying Violence Exists, is enabling violence:

Some will say that believing violence to always be a failure is a wish, if we all believe in it, it would come true. No harm done, let hope rule the minds.

The problem with that approach is that it equates to saying that, if we should hope to run head first in a brick wall, that will not hurt, if we all believe this.

And what brick wall is that? Homo is both sheep and wolf. The wolves eat the sheep. And if there are only sheep, the wolves will arise. [1] Human genetics and epigenetics, human ethology, is the wall of reality. The very motivating principle of Homo is not curiosity, which compels the eye, but violence, which enables us to move. To go down from the tree and venture into the savannah an ape is not made for, was a violence against nature, the ape, the order of things. It took more than curiosity, it took the infliction of force… and that is exactly the definition of violence.

The best and most human progress Homo has made in the last 5 million years, among its different species, has been propped by the same curiosity enabled by violence. Five million years, 200,000 generations is plenty of time to enshrine behaviors genetically. Moreover, as Homo was a murdering success during those 200,000 generations, physically eliminating the Untermenschen, the sous-hommes, the low lives, the genetic pressure was intense: types which were not curious or violent enough were eliminated.

The end result is a very curious and very violent species.

I have walked dozens of miles, deep in dessicated canyons among the corpses of millennial trees… All the water having long been sent to Los Angeles by elaborate tunnels hundreds of miles long through towering ranges… Yes, the most violent species which ever was. Violence, of course doesn’t have to mean vicious. Unfortunately it often does.

***

Can’t stop to the parents? Punish the child: seen and personally experienced in Spring 2019:

I had an excellent example in my personal life in the last two months: we presented our concerns about toxic chemicals, and other carcinogenic substances, and microplastics to the relevant administration. We were worried that the lives of hundreds of small children in two different elementary schools (starting in pre K) might be threatened, and exactly why. We reviewed thousands of pages of primary scientific and engineering and distilled that down to 100 pages or so. We offered non-toxic, or mitigating alternatives.

Instead of having a dialogue about our concerns, the relevant administration informed us that if we spoke of this with anyone, including trustees, our daughter, nine year old, would be thrown out of school, immediately. And so she was.

I have way higher moral standards than that: if the nine year children of Goebbels or the most vicious jihadist attended school, I would kindly teach them… Maybe I would teach sternly, but I would teach them… and never punish them for the acts of their parents. But here I was confronted with young punks in charge of a school, and, because they dine with Bill Gates, Macron and their ilk, all they need to know is which way money is flowing, and that we were in the way, making us most maleficent, in their greedy eyes of the ultimately connected.

Interestingly, as we resisted the infamy of the conspiring vicious greedsters, increasingly violent methods were used by those who wanted to submit us. Outrageous lies, in print… False accusations of violence, were instigators turned perpetrators were presented as victims, etc.

***

Gandhi was naive about violence. The price has been heavy, worse is to come, potentially:

At that point, some will brandish Gandhi, often presented, ironically enough, as the epitome of non-violence. Gandhi “non-violence” was just violence by other means, and it worked because the British would have self-defeated by using greater violence in India. While Gandhi pressed the Indian Congress to not declare war to his friend Hitler, in 1939, the British Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared India’s entry into the World War without consulting prominent Indian Congress leaders who were just elected in previous elections.

Gandhi launched a movement against fighting the Nazis, although the latter’s atrocities had become blatant. In 1942, him and 60,000 of his followers were imprisoned for the duration (Gandhi was freed in 1944 for ill health). Meanwhile, the Muslim institutions in India enthusiastically supported the British war effort. Muslims constituted 40% of the huge Indian 2.5 million men army. That and the Indian armament industry stopped the Imperial Japanese drive into South Asia.

Thus India properly applied violence during WWII, in a way that advanced civilization… however Gandhi’s hypocritical pro-Nazism fed the split with the Muslims which led to civil war and the creation of Pakistan (and its potential nuclear Armageddon). [2]

***

To be human is to be violent…

Even if it’s one plastic diaper at a time, or one load of detergent laden wash at a time, or one South Asia trip, from the other side of the planet, at a time… Tourism, with present polluting technology, is still violence, as far as the biosphere is concerned.

Violence is all over, it’s a psychological attractor. Consider the death penalty: it was excusable when jails were not very much available (say 2,000 years ago). However, nowadays, life imprisonment is much more effective. Yet the USA, for example still kills (and not just Bin Laden, who was silenced, even more than Saddam Hussein…)

By advertizing that some acts should be punished by death of the perpetrator, society promotes the idea that killing is sometimes best, the crucial belief murderers need to murder in the first place.

***

So, what to do?

Face the music, the music of Homo. Understand that intelligence is violence, understand that some violence is good to have (say, to crush the Nazis). And that other forms of violence have to be absolutely avoided. When millions of protesters went into Hong Kong’s streets, they were violent, the government whined. Right. But it was even more violent to decide to send suspects to be judged by the other system, a violation of the spirit of the accord of re-integration of Hong Kong into the PRC… The violence of the protesters was arguably greater, just as the violence of opposition to Nazism was, by some measures, greater than the violence of the Nazis. The same holds for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: violent. sure, but two orders of magnitude less than what the Japanese military imposed on the rest of the world.

The calculus of violence optimizes it, from very careful studying, and thinking… and it’s crucial to determine for which ultimate aims. Optimal calculus of violence what humanity, at its best, does. Berating violence, to the point of ignoring it, is a cop-out, a strategy to avoid the most important debates. Violence is unavoidable, in any case. And, looked at it the right way, we are living in the most violent times. Ever. [3]

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] In some species of fish, when there are only females left, some turn into males, and even super-males. Humans are the same; with too many human sheep around, some will turn into wolves… So it is, from deep seated evolutionary safeguards… 

***

[2] Gandhi’s hypocritical pseudo-pacifism is reminiscent of the US Congress similar posing at the time.

***

[3] Plutocratic sycophants such as Pinker have claimed we lived in the best of all possible times. Their ignorance of the ultimate violence of biosphere destruction is not just immoral, it’s going to turn Armageddon into reality, pretty soon.

Sun, Violent Stars, And Their Superflares

In the Chinese blockbuster movie “Wandering Earth“, the Sun goes red giant, and then Jupiter has a gravity spike (as the Earth swings by). Could it happen? According to today’s official physics, no. According to my own Sub Quantic Physics Reality (SQPR), yes. [1] Established scientists may smirk. However, smirking by established scientists or thinkers about imaginable science or thinking, all too often just exhibit their limited understanding of their own lack of understanding, and, or, imagination. 

A problem for our future conquest of the galaxy is that most stars are unstable Red Dwarves. I have argued it means we should be able to find lots of planets with very primitive life, as the most sophisticated type of life would be periodically eradicated. The past is hard to predict… except now we can look at it, with powerful telescopes… and read it.

Stars explode. Stars do also plenty of smaller, more sustainable flares and conflagrations…. The mass extinction level kill radius of a supernova (above) is at least ten light years. But to kill life in a solar system, a star can do, with much smaller explosions: the Earth is only 8 light minutes from the Sun…

When US astronauts went to the Moon, they found traces of a scorching superflare… so dreadful an idea, nobody evokes it anymore…

Studies by the US Kepler space telescope of  solar-type (G-type main-sequence), combined with Apache Point Observatory (APO) 3.5 m telescope spectroscopic observations and the European space telescope show that stars as old and sedate as the sun undergo “superflares”. Working from a sample of about 90,000 Sun-like stars, the researchers identified more than 1,000 superflares from about 300 stars.

The researchers thought these stars would be  rotating rapidly. Quickly spinning stars tend to have strong magnetic fields that easily get tangled up, bunching up, which is thought to kick off flares. However, a fast spin is apparently not a requirement for strong eruptions. Combining their brightness data with radius estimates from the Gaia satellite, the researchers were able to determine how fast their flaring stars were spinning. As expected, stars that rotate once every few days had superflares about 20 times as powerful as more slowly spinning stars like the Sun, which rotates about once every 25 days. However, Sun-like stars were still seen producing hazardous superflares.

A superflare could destroy lots of electronic on Earth (and adversely affect space explorers). Thus, the Sun has to be studied much more.

In September 1859, a solar flare sent a wave of charged particles washing over our planet. It triggered one of the most powerful geomagnetic storms ever recorded: the Carrington Event. As the particles slammed into Earth’s protective magnetic field, they triggered beautiful aurorae that stretched as far south as Hawaii and Cuba. But the Carrington Event didn’t just produce pretty lights in the sky. It also wreaked havoc on telegraph networks spread across North America and Europe. In fact, there are reports of the cosmically overcharged telegraph lines starting fires and shocking telegraph operators during the event.

Explosive activity on sun-like stars is tied to their age, and their rotation. The older, and the slower the rotation, the less explosive. Superflares with energies 5 × 10^34 erg occur on old, slowly rotating Sun-like stars (P rot ~ 25 days) approximately once every 2000–3000 yr, while young, rapidly rotating stars with P rot ~ a few days have superflares up to 10^36 erg.

That would mean energies 500 times that of the Carrington event… which was only 10^32 ergs… and would still be devastating today…[2]

In any case, constant disasters out there in space is my solution to the “Fermi Paradox” (evoking the aliens, “Where is everybody?”, joked Enrico, once at breakfast in the 1950s…)

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/40-billion-earths-yes-no/

And the more we look, the more we see how true that seems…

Philosophically speaking, that implies life on Earth we are busy destroying is much more of a miracle than is generally felt: watch all the plastic, all over, all the fossil fuels burned, etc…

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] In SQPR, Dark Matter can be lumpy (also an experimental fact). Also, it influences inertia and other forces, including gravity (hence Dark Energy). So crossing a Dark Matter lump may affect all forces. A gravity spike inside the Sun would cause high mass nuclides to fuse, as happen in Red Giant, or Supernovas…

***

[2] Most powerful supernova found: 10^ 45 ergs per second, or 10^ 38 watts, or 30 times the energy of the entire giant Milky Way (which is larger than Andromeda). So the most powerful flares are a billion times less powerful… But they tend to be directed in a particular direction… Mars lost its atmosphere from solar flares…

 

French, Mandarin, Indo-European Languages; Why Multilingualism Brings Higher Wisdom

Multilingualism is a basic human capability, long honed by biological evolution. It may be necessary to achieve the highest mental capabilities, as multilingual speakers learn to adjudicate between modes of expression, the most advanced form of thinking.

So which languages? Excellent article by my frenemy Mehdi Lazar, summarizing well most of the situation with French:”The New Dynamic of French In The World.”. To point out that French and Mandarin are the most important languages (with English, de facto lingua franca) is crucial. Indeed, French is basically the core language of Europe: it is grammatically impoverished Latin bastardized with German prepositions, where many words have been phonetically and alphabetically simplified from the Latin originals. English was an afterthought. French is a fast evolving language (hopefully to go with fast minds).

This understates reality: for example North Africa spoke Latin for 900 years before the Arab invasion. Modern Latin, that is French, is widely understood, practiced and spoken in the Maghreb (in spite of efforts by local dictators of Islamist inspiration to kill it). Africa, light green, has to speak Latin derived languages (including English), because there are way too many native languages (or slave derived languages like Swahili)

Compare say the French “opital” from the original Latin “hospitalis”… English, which is actually more conservative than French, is in between with “HoSpital”: the H and S are still pronounced in English, not in French. The french found that the aspired H in the beginning, the S in the middle, and the “IS” at the end, were all useless, so they dropped them!

English, although technically classified as a “Germanic” language is mostly poorly pronounced French, and the more so, the more sophisticated the vocabulary is (85% + of words in common). Naturally, per its central position in Western Europe, French is then a happy medium between English and the other “romance” languages.

Now the baby elephant in the porcelain shop is that unruly child of Great Britain and France, the USA. Ironically enough, the dreaded “Anglo-Saxons” contribute to French by often going back to the Latin, that is, the original French, and creating words that way.

Here is an example: impact. The word appeared in English circa 1600, for “press closely into something,” from Latin impactus, past participle of impingere “to push into, drive into, strike against”. The word appears in French science and technological vocabulary only in 1824. But not just that, it’s an extremely important word, as it expresses the transmission of force (= how things act upon each other). Thus, in US English it has come to be used, since the 1990s as a… verb. As in: this essay impacts linguistics hard.

Thus it’s only a matter of time before the French verb “impacter” appears… and it would be a very useful verb… created as words should be created in French, going to the original Latin.

Another view: this time more of Africa shows up. Erroneously, but it’s a traditional error, English is not viewed as a Greco-Roman language (although it is fundamentally Greco-Roman, with more than 85% sophisticated words basically French…

Multilingualism is natural, humanity evolved as multilingual: our brains are made to learn several languages, and it enables us to better learn to adjudicate thoughts and forms of expression.

How so? Transportation was extremely difficult in the world of the past, except in those few places with steppe (like the Eurasian steppe, which goes from Hungary to Korea, that enormous freeway in the middle of Eurasia). Thus people evolved many languages even over very short distances. An example is Senegal: in this small countries, seven languages evolved, and some are tonal (Serer) and others not (Wolof). This is typical of the past, so human beings had to be multilingual.

However, there are only that many languages one can learn: French and Mandarin are the great linguistic anchors of the world, a continent apart.

But not just this: except for deplorable episodes such as the ephemeral collapses of the Greco-Roman and Chinese states under the invasions of various savages, Western Europe and China have long been at the forefront of civilization, spearheading progress. Learning basic Chinese arithmetic is fascinating: the Chinese found more rational ways to do it.

The state of Qin and the contemporaneous Roman Republic were remarkably based on the same principles of law, reason and technological progress… and that’s why they founded great empires (alive and well to this day, as descendant regimes). Actually the present inchoate world government embodied by the United Nations rests on Roman Republican legal principles, or even the letter of the Roman law (that’s similar to the Qin obsession with law… which was even applied to one of its most ardent proponent, a famous Qin PM who finished quartered by horses, as the law prescribed for the sort of corruption he had unfortunately engaged in…)

China understood the importance of intellectualism (the “Mandarin” examination system) and science… And that is why China was so successful, and the anchor civilization of East Asia (Japan and Vietnam used to employ Chinese character… Although the French switched Vietnam, and japan evolved a bit on its own…) Thus, from all this will to advanced thinking, China invented many technologies the world uses now. Even in the Nineteenth Century, Chinese drilling for natural gas, one kilometer down, or more, was the world’s most advanced.

The Frankish empire, both Merovingian and Carolingian, soon renamed itself “Renovatio Imperium Romanum”. Indeed, it “renovated” Rome on way better principles: no more terrorizing, stupidifying, sordid Christian fanaticism… and, soon enough, no more slavery: Saint Queen Bathilde outlawed the slave trade in 655 CE… Throughout much of Western Europe. So when the Franks invaded England in 1066, they freed the 20% of slaves there. These philosophical changes had huge economic, social and military impacts… 

Thus learning French and Mandarin is not just about speaking what many speak, and will speak. It’s about learning what made civilization what it has become… including learning the grave errors which made it so much better.

The “mission civilisatrice” is not over, it’s just starting. It’s not just a matter of feeling, and being, superior, it’s a matter of surviving. And not just for this species, but for the entire biosphere. You all will learn to think better, or you will learn to die, sordid. Go multilingual!

Patrice Ayme

Rome Fell While Rising, Rome Won By Losing

How Rome fell is not easy to conceive: as aspects of Rome were falling, aspects of Rome were rising. Ah, and what is “Rome”? A civilization, that is, the embodiment of systems of thoughts and mentalities, moods. Some of these moods went down in flames, and had to do so, while, and because, others blossomed.

For example, way back, Romans made human sacrifices (as did everybody else, it seems). After severe military losses against Celts, Rome sacrificed a couple of prisoners. After doing away with the raiding Celts, Rome was ashamed of those sacrifices and never did one again (some will sneer that executions of war prisoners for centuries to come were little else…) So that was a mood which crashed and burned.

More cogently, in the ancient Republic, the Pater Familias, father of the family, had right of life and death on the entire family. That right was removed later. Another mentality that went down the trashcan of history.

Other progressive legislations ascended, even in the thick of imperial fiat. Caracalla for example made Roman citizenship universal (the Franks would duplicate that idea later: by 600 CE, all denizens of the Frankish empire were “Franks”… although a century earlier the Franks were a small minority of Gallia). Cynics have pointed out that enabled the Roman government to tax everybody…

Lead Emissions are proportional to overall metal production, for technical reasons. The Frankish renaissance of metallurgy is blatant on this graph. It happened because the Franks conquered Eastern Europe, and one can see that was even before Charlemagne’s birth. Data from Greenland ice cores.

The forceful, ordered from the top, rise of Christianism brought the rule of softer notions, for example that the most cruel games of the circus were overindulged in. While that was good, the Christian drive against animal passions of the worst type was accompanied by a drive against some of the most necessary animal or specifically human passions. For example, criticism against authority, thus against the emperor as god, or god himself, became a capital crime. But there is no more fundamentally human passion than harsh thinking.

Christian theofascism brought, in no small measure, however indirectly, the fall of the Occidental Part (Pars Occidentalis). Indeed Theodosius, using the Goths, defeated the secular army of Occident, made mostly of Romanized Franks fighting under the banner of Hercules (symbolizing the most altruistic hard work for the community), in 394 CE. That left Occident without defense, but for a curtain of Slatic Franks which was pierced at the 406 CE Winter Solstice, when the Rhine could be galloped across…

This said, there were nice, progressive aspects to Christianism: although, overall, a catastrophe in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries, some elements of civilizations invented them, very few of them, were worth keeping.

Those progressive elements were brandished by the Franks shortly thereafter. See, for example, Martin of Tours, a Roman officer who as he was approaching the gates of the city of Amiens, met a scantily clad beggar. He cut his military cloak in half to share with the man (around 350 CE).  

The Franks, under Consul Imperator King Clovis, invented Christianism with a human face. And the first application of that newly found humanity was to annihilate the Goths (Vouillé  507 CE). Being more human doesn’t just make you a better beast, it makes you win wars.

Another mood the Franks resurrected, after 5 centuries of Octavian-Augustus launched intellectual fascism, was the pleasure of debate and iconoclasm. Clovis, a fierce fighter, who killed the king of the Goths with his own hands, was excellent at that.

The basic undoing of the Roman Republic was its capture by a class of super wealthy idiots. They comprised the Senatorial class. Sounds familiar?There were up to 600 Senators; numbers varied; Octavian-Augustus, the first “emperor”, who called himself “First”, Princeps, executed 100 Senators… Not counting the many killed in battle during the Civil War, just prior.

Having the entire society guided and owned by a few hundred families was antithetical to the Republic: the Plebs had gone on strike against that, centuries prior. But this time, the reaction of the Plebs was too little too late.

The wealthy idiots owners of everything important censored any deep thinking that contradicted them. We see this nowadays.

But the hyper wealthy couldn’t censor the gathering ecological and military crises. Roman society depended crucially upon metals, to make tools and weapons. As the Islamists swept all in the way (they had just eradicated Persia), emperors desperately needed metals to make the equivalent of big guns then, the Gregian Fire. So the emperor came from Constantinople, and striped the metallic roofs of Rome. The gathered metal never reached Constantinople, as the Islamists seized it:

***

Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, book 5, chapters 11-13 (PL95, cols 602 and 604):

1.  But the emperor Constans, when he found that he could accomplish nothing against the Langobards, directed all the threats of his cruelty against his own followers, that is, the Romans. He left Naples and proceeded to Rome.  At the sixth mile-stone from the city, pope Vitalian came to meet him with his priests and the Roman people. And when the emperor had come to the threshold of St. Peter he offered there a pallium woven with gold; and remaining at Rome twelve days he pulled down everything that in ancient times had been made of metal for the ornament of the city, to such an extent that he even stripped off the roof of the church of the blessed Mary which at one time was called the Pantheon, and had been founded in honor of all the gods and was now by the consent of the former rulers the place of all the martyrs; and he took away from there the bronze tiles and sent them with all the other ornaments to Constantinople. Then the emperor returned to Naples, and proceeded by the land route to the city of Regium (Reggio) ; and having entered Sicily during the seventh indiction he dwelt in Syracuse and put such afflictions upon the people—the inhabitants and land owners of Calabria, Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia – as were never heard of before, so that even wives were separated from their husbands and children from their parents. The people of these regions also endured many other and unheard of things so that the hope of life did not remain to any one. For even the sacred vessels and the treasures of the holy churches of God were carried away by the imperial command and by the avarice of the Greeks. And the emperor remained in Sicily from the seventh to the twelfth indiction, but at last he suffered the punishment of such great iniquities and while he was in the bath he was put to death by his own servants.

XII.  When the emperor Constantine was killed at Syracuse, Mecetius (Mezezius) seized the sovereignty in Sicily, but without the consent of the army of the East.  The soldiers of Italy, others throughout Istria, others through the territories of Campania and others from the regions of Africa and Sardinia came to Syracuse against him and deprived him of life. And many of his judges were brought to Constantinople beheaded and with them in like manner the head of the false emperor was also carried off.

XIII. The nation of the Saracens that had already spread through Alexandria and Egypt, hearing these things, came suddenly with many ships, invaded Sicily, entered Syracuse and made a great slaughter of the people – a few only escaping with difficulty who had fled to the strongest fortresses and the mountain ranges – and they carried off also great booty and all that art work in brass and different materials which the emperor Constantine had taken away from Rome; and thus they returned to Alexandria.

The problem we have now are all too similar. Not yet military disasters, but ecological disasters are already upon us, and they have everything to do with the ravenous class which owns and direct today’s modes of thinking. And feeling.

After its near-death experience in the Fifth Century, Rome rose again, but on better principles. Rome won, by losing its most evil ways. Too bad much of the population died in parts of Occident (in the Orient and Spain this would happen from Islamist conquest). One may have to thank the do-goodism of Christianism which led to the outlawing of slavery by Saint Queen Bathilde.

However, we don’t have the luxury now of waiting centuries for better moods to gather momentum. We may run out of oxygen well before that.

Patrice Ayme

Olive Branch: Peace By Changing Moods, Thus Logic, From Conflict, To Life.

Athena competed with Poseidon for possession of Athens. Poseidon claimed possession by thrusting his trident into the Acropolis, where a well of sea-water gushed out. Athena took possession by planting the first olive tree beside the well.

The court of gods and goddesses ruled that Athena had the better right to the land because she had given it the better gift.

Why are olive branches brandished to extend offers of peace? What does the olive branch represent? An Olive Branch consists of a meager branch to which are attached pretty silver-green leaves… illustrating life, and promising olives. Olives fed people, and those fruits also provided them with oil, the main oil of the Mediterranean region. The Olive Branch thus reminds people of the logic of agriculture, sustenance of trees, no less, spanning generations, providing the means for life… The exact opposite of the logic of war.

Olive tree branches above the Mediterranean Sea (Italy).

There are logics, and they are always entangled with moods, overwhelming emotional systems tied in to the underlying neurobiology itself.

This is true even in the foundations of physics: moods rule. For example, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics claimed that the observer was the creator of reality. That overbearing mood had enormous consequences on the entire mentality, itself a logic, entangled with emotion, of the Twentieth Century.

Thus, there was no real reality, that Copenhagen mood claimed, only created interpretations, and, thus, implicitly, the Leader created the world. Ever since, Leaders have been ruling… disowning We The People of responsibility, and the desire to partake in information, let alone decision. 

However that entire logic, and the mentality attached to it, has just been revealed by a French physicist  to be erroneous. [1] 

The logic of this entire civilization, and the emotional roots it is entangled with, thus has to be changed. Back to real reality, instead of wishful thinking masquerading as real.

Athena’s Owl, symbolizing wisdom, surrounded by olive branches. Silver coin, Athens 200 BCE, French Coin Museum.

Changing logico-emotional systems of moods is what the Olive Branch does. Beethoven was aware that moods have to be changed forcefully to reestablish joy, and that, without it, nature’s breast was out of reach. As Ludwig put it in the 9th Symphony Ode to Joy:

“O friends, no more of these sounds!

Let us sing more cheerful songs,

More songs full of joy!

Joy!

Joy!

Joy, bright spark of divinity,

Daughter of Elysium,

Fire-inspired we tread

Within thy sanctuary.

Thy magic power re-unites

All that custom has divided,

All men become brothers,

Under the sway of thy gentle wings.

Whoever has created

An abiding friendship,

Or has won

A true and loving wife,

All who can call at least one soul theirs,

Join our song of praise;

But those who cannot must creep tearfully

Away from our circle.

All creatures drink of joy

At nature’s breast.”

A civilization is not just a bunch of buildings, a court, an army, and a few verses. It is, first of all, a collective mood. Forceful changes of logics is how one gets one’s smarts up high enough to survive.

The Olive Branch symbolizes the change of logic. From conflict, to the essence of life. [2]

At some point, the logic of conflict has to change to the logic of life. Waving an Olive Branch reminds us of life.

Now the Olive Branch needs to be brandished, not just to other People, but to Planet Earth Herself.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] (Michel Devoret is 66 year old, thus working at Yale University, escaping mandatory retirement in France.

***

[2] The Bible captured later the Greek Myth. Olive branches are held by the right talon of the US Eagle, in the 1776 CE Great Seal of the USA (the left hold a fasces of arrows…)

 

Absence of Presence Is Not Presence of Absence: Quantum Jumps Predicted, Copenhagen Interpretation Shattered

A bit less than a century ago, the formidable computational arsenal of Quantum Mechanics Interpretation Copenhagen (QMIC) was erected. The whole enterprise consisted in no less than deciding what reality was about. Grotesquely erroneous principles of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM such as: “Only what can be observed is real”…. Had tremendous effects on the collective psyche of the intellectual leadership of the world.

For example, if only what is observed is real, then what Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, or the Khmer Rouge, or Franco, did was not real… as long as it couldn’t be observed. As per this philosophy of appearances, some of the leaders of physics in Germany were fanatical Nazis.

This sort of philosophy worthy of a two year old held sway in the mind of the collective. To make fun of it, Schrodinger and einstein (they were writing to each other, there is some evidence einstein originated the idea) invented the “Schrodinger Cat”.

According to the idiotic QMIC, a cat in death mechanism box was a mix of dead and live cat. Schrodinger’s point was that we all know very well that, at any given moment the cat is not alive and dead, but alive OR dead.[1]

***

Applied French Physicist Michel Devoret Reveals (At Least Part Of) Copenhagen Interpretation Is Hogwash:

If I understand the experiment well, what Devoret and the youngsters he is directing succeeded to do is this. They illuminate an atom A, and A gives back a light L, which they continuously monitored. When A stops suddenly emitting L, they know they atom A is going to undergo some so-called “Quantum Jump”. [2]

It turns out that, contrarily to what the Copenhagen Interpretation pack of irrational beings believed 100%, Quantum Jumps have more to do with the situation above than with what Bohr, Heisenberg and their sycophants believed…

In other words, Devoret and al. found a way to predict a Quantum Jump, one should call it a Quantum ERUPTION (so the speak).  

This means that there is an inner machinery inside the atom, just as there is an inner machinery inside a volcano (so Einstein, De Broglie, Schrodinger were right to hypothesize that it was ignorance which showed up, to some extent, as ignorance).

***

Here We Have Atomic “Quantum Jumps” neither instantaneous nor random:

The researchers built a superconducting electrical circuit that behaves like an atom with three energy levels. These are: the ground state; an auxiliary “bright” state that can be connected to the ground state by a transition stimulated by microwave light; and a “dark” state into which the atom can jump.

They managed to control the quantum jump once it engaged in its preparatory phase, by applying an electric pulse to the artificial atom. In this way, they intercepted it and sent it back to the ground state. They are only able to do this because the quantum jump is not truly instantaneous and random. Instead, quantum jumps take the same trajectory between the two energy levels every time, so it is possible to predict how to send them back.

According to the Yale team, this is an important point: “while quantum jumps appear discrete and random in the long run, reversing a quantum jump means the evolution of the quantum state possesses, in part, a deterministic and non-random character,” say Devoret and Minev. “The jump always occurs in the same, predictable manner from its random starting point.”.

“The findings are in complete agreement with the predictions of modern quantum trajectory theory,” Devoret told Physics World, “with essentially no adjustable parameters. One of the applications for the type of experiment performed in our study is an efficient method for detecting very weak signals buried in quantum noise, and real-time intervention based on the results of this detection.” [3]

“The results should also provide new ground for exploring intervention techniques to control quantum systems, such as the early detection of error syndromes in quantum error correction,” adds Minev, Devoret’s Post Doc. An unexpected jump could signal a mistake in calculations, for instance, and might allow researchers to spot the beginning of the jump and account for the error – or perhaps even reverse it before it is enacted. This is not the first time Quantum Jumps are found to have structure: when a laser ionizes an atom, it waa found in 1916, that there are two possibilities and they last different durations.

Devoret and his lab reported their work in Nature 10.1038/s41586-019-1287-z, will try to generalize their experiment to a situation involving two distant measurements on a common entangled system and see how the two distant jumps correlate. “This would be analogous to dissecting a Bell-inequality violation measurement,” says Devoret.

I always thought that SUB QUANTUM PHYSICS REALITY (SQPR) would appear in experiments. This is evidence of existence thereof.

It’s also of general interest. The pre-toddler philosophy established by Bohr and company may have in turn led to the extreme relativism of “French Theory”, a disease which has affected viciously not just philosophy, but politics, economics, sociology (present day “populism” is a long-delayed reaction to it). Supposedly, according to these extreme irrealists, there are “no savages”!

…and all these ideologies, characterized by the deep denial of reality, served plutocracy well.

One mistake the Copenhagen Interpretation pack of deliriously irrational physicists was to confuse absence of evidence for evidence of absence. An elementary error of the most basic type which toddler learn to master. But you know, they were infected with expert arrogance.   

Yes, there are savages, and yes the Copenhagen Interpretation was for idiots, by idiots. Bohr, Heisenberg, etc. idiots? Of course. Smart in the physics they did (most of it direct consequence of De Broglie’s breakthrough work), didn’t’ make them philosophically competent. Watch Heisenberg directing the Nazi atomic energy program…. [4]

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Schrodinger believed there were no Quantum Jumps”… so he called them “Quantum Jerks” to make fun of them…

***

[2]  That’s an example of “indirect quantum non-demolition measurement”

***

[3] How does Quantum Trajectory Theory (QTT) sits with my own SQPR? Well, pretty well: SQPR says, basically, that the particle hump will dissipate, extend, linearize itself away. That means that, for short times, QTT ~ SQPR…

***

[4] Not to say that all the physics done by the Copenhagen School and its followers (“Shut up and calculate” school) was bad and useless, far from it: QED, QCD, etc. are all excellent and true. As I said above the main damage of the Copenhagen Interpretation may have been the damage it did to reason in general. Now it’s history. That and the Inquisition…

Why Iran Can’t Have Nuclear Weapons

I talked to a young US citizen, who is also an Iranian citizen. He studies International Relations. He used to visit Iran continually (his family has various property in Iran, including farmland up north). But now no more: he is old enough to be drafted in the Iranian army, and he doesn’t want that to happen. He is secular, and not thrilled with the theologists in Iran. However, considering nuclear weapons, he said: “why can’t we have them?” As most Iranians, he feels that to be deprived of nuclear weapons is a strident injustice. Who doesn’t want to partake in nuclear fun?

For reference, the Japanese, who were smarter than the Nazis, knew perfectly well that nuclear bombs could be made, and had three programs, using different techniques, to make them (one was located in North Korea, rich in hydro, then Jap occupied). One idea was to have a bomb ready to drop on GIs gathered on a beach. However the crazed maniacs who had bullied their way at the top of Japan got a taste of that medicine before they got their own ready:

Nagasaki Bomb Explosion. The Christian city and its cathedral were not the primary objectives. Clouds got in the way. The shipyards initially targeted in another city were switched at the last moment. The bluff was to persuade the crazed maniacs leading Japan that there would be such a bomb every three days. They capitulated before the largest city of the northern island of Japan got atom bombed too. Ultimately, the atomic bombings saved millions of lives, mostly civilians in China being killed by the system the Jap invaders had set up…

In the 1960s, there was an important movement against nuclear weapons. The threat was clear: as weapons were not precise then, war planners had advised to make giant bombs: may be they could not land where intended, but then they would destroy everything in a giant radius, that was good enough. Standard equipment on bombers were bombs in the megaton range. The USSR produced up to 50,000 thermonuclear bombs or so.

A semblance of sanity prevailed later and thanks to Reagan (!) and Gorbachev, arsenals got reduced by 90% or so. (Compare with my useless friend Obama, who achieved no arm reduction, just the opposite…)

However, even after reductions, nuclear weapon systems are still formidable.

A French defense minister pointed out in the last few years:”We can kill 50 million people in twenty minutes, and we think that’s enough.”[1]

No solution was found to world denuclearization. The balance of terror is all the parental guidance the world is getting. [2] 

In the 1950-60s, because of the existential threat to Israel, France helped Israel develop nuclear weapons. At some point 5,000 French engineers were at Dimona, the top Israeli nuclear site. Israeli scientists took part in the French nuclear bomb program, all the more as rabid pacifism was rampant in the French intellectual community, and most French  physicists refused to develop nukes (ironically enough the same who hated the bomb in 1960 wanted it in 1938; but the enemy was not the same!)

It has been said by those who should know, that Israel has of the order of 200 nuclear warheads. During the Yom Kippur war, using nukes was considered. It didn’t come to that, in part because high precision US weapons arrived in a timely manner.

Since then Pakistan and India have developed large nuclear arsenals. Their main potential effect will be to reduce considerably the overcrowding of South Asia.

So most Iranians want nuclear weapons: why can’t we have them?

After all, Iran has existed for longer than India… (Lore and archeology indicate.)

But then is Islamized Iran really Iran? Even the Iranians don’t know from one moment to the next. Thus most of Iranian feasts are gloomy, except for Norouz (which is at least 5,000 years old).

The reason is that if Iran gets nukes, surely so will Arabia, and then why not Egypt, Algeria, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam, etc. And of course Japan could have thousands of nukes, any time, it’s just a small constitutional change away.

Nuclear Armageddon would be guaranteed.

So, unfortunately, the balance of terror and nuclear strike supremacy of the Permanent Members of the Security Council has to stay in place: only them should have nukes.

***

Why The UNSC (UN Security Council) and its five members?

One has to go back to history. China is the oldest civilization with the Western Cradle (the Indo-European civilization). Either have had organized sedentary, agricultural, states for five thousand years. Overall, France and China have been the most prominent military powers of the last two millennia. France was the modernized form of the Roman state and its continuation, and pretty much created Europe, while China created Japan, Vietnam, etc.

Chinese defenses mostly failed in the last millenium, and China spent most of the time occupied by Mongols, Jurgens, and Manchus. (OK, arguably only the Mongols (=Yuans) were really not Chinese.) In the first half of the 20C, Japan tried to invade China, and became crazed fascist from trying too hard.

Meanwhile Germany’s fascist plutocracy tried to seize all of Europe as colony, and was defeated by France and Britain. Their progeniture, the US, caused Europe more problems than it solved, and flew to the rescue of victory in wars it had contributed to launch, organize and maintain. Twice. (Yes, most historians would disagree, but they are paid to say what they say, whereas I am only rewarded with expressing the truth, a fundamental human instinct and pleasure.)  

Thus France, Britain, the US, China, Russia could pose as the main combatants against barbarity, horror, and infamy in the 20C… and they were. Moreover the first three are the champion of democracy, human rights (France abolished slavery in 655 CE, imposing that to all of Europe and later the world; then formally re-established the “Renovatio Imperium Romanorum“ (Renovation of the Empire of the Romans), unwilded Germany, in 1066 CE France abolished slavery in England, and French imperialists there ended establishing the world’s most advanced democracy, the British Parliament, etc.)

***

So it is OK that those five have nuclear weapons: they are unlikely to engage in crazed world conquest. To those who moan that France had a giant empire, let them be reminded that it was a “Mission Civilisatrice”… Not a joke when you look at the details. French Canada was not the English Colony in the Americas: the later, founded by private investors, practiced genocide, whereas the French colony, under tight government control, didn’t.  (This is also why the English won the war… Nothing like genocide, when you want space, as Hitler pointed out cogently, yet idiotically… because those things are better left unsaid.)

Argentina and Brazil were persuaded to drop their atomic bomb program. South Africa, too, and accepted to dismantle seven already completed bombs.

The world order we have now is not the best imaginable… But it works. Some Germans moan they would like a Permanent Security Council seat. Well, they already have it… through France. Otherwise why not Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, etc.? The beauty of it all is that all these countries can, and have sieged at the UNSC. Just, they aren’t permanent and don’t have veto powers.

So Iran will not get nukes. Arabia and Israel are dead set against it. Arabia tolerated the nukes of its de facto ally Israel: everybody understands Israel is very small, very hated, and has been disappeared thrice already, once by the Babylonians, later by the Romans, and finally by the Nazis. One could say they have excuses to take existence seriously.

But Arabia will not tolerate to have Iran as local superpower. Not again: they have seen that movie before, several times.

***

Shah Abbas expanded Iran back into Iraq (as happened many times prior).

Iran Was Not Always Pacific:

A leitmotiv, out there, repeated by millions of parrots, is that Iran was always pacific.

In the early Seventh Century, Iran, then Sassanid Persia, conquered most of Arabia. The backlash is that god crazed Arabs destroyed the Sassanid empire a few years later (the Romans had done the heavy lift of destroyed the Sassanids before, literally a few years before the Arabs attacked, led by their great strategist Muhammad…)    

Using an army formed in part of ghulams—Christian slaves from Armenia and Georgia who had been converted to Islam—Shah ‘Abbas re-established Iran’s borders, defeating the Uzbeks in the northeast. He would eventually expand his empire, seizing the Kingdom of Hormuz from the Portuguese, on the other side of the Arabo-Persian Gulf, and defeating the Ottomans to take control of Baghdad (Iraq) in 1623 CE. These conquests allowed Shah ‘Abbas and Iranians access to the sacred Shi’i shrines of Kazimayn, Karbala and Najaf in Iraq. It also gave the Shah complete control of trade coming through the Persian Gulf. The Shah created a magnificent capital, Isfahan, in the south. A breathtaking city I had the good fortune to visit, with some of the world’s most beautiful building (blue and gold mosques).

Not again will the Arabs say. Conscious of the fact the present world order needs to be sustain, the US and the EU agree… And no, Russia and China are not stupid enough to come to the rescue of Iran in a significant way… That’s precisely why China and Russia are on the UNSC: because they aren’t crazed too much.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Standard US and French bombs are around 250 kilotons nowadays. But they are typically on a “bus” carrying up to nine other independently guided bombs. Thus one missile on just one nuclear sub missile could destroy the largest city. for example Teheran. France has 4 of these Armageddon subs, the UK has three (the fourth was denuclearized). The US has 14 such subs, each nearly 20,000 tons (!!!), carrying 24 Trident missiles with up to eight nuclear warheads… 4 other such subs were denuclearized…)

***

2] Accidental nuclear war from a short circuit is possible, as Launch-On-Warning systems are still in existence, in Russia or the USA (France doesn’t do launch-on-warning, as it depends upon aircraft and nuclear subs). Unbelievably, supposedly progressive politicians in the West have long stopped caring about Launch-On-Warning, although such systems can launch nuclear war, Terminator style, any day…. Another deep failure of the Clinton and Obama administrations (I didn’t expect progressive smarts from W. Bush or Trump! But when the self-declared progressives are not progressive, we have a serious problem…)