Only Knowledge Is Truly Noble

The long beaks of Black Plague doctors, circa 1348 CE, ensured social distancing, so did their sticks. Goggles glasses integrated to Plague Personal Protection Equipment covering the entire body, prevented the Plague to enter through the eyes… Similarly, COVID can enter the body through the eyes, but Twenty-First Century medical authorities forgot to consult with their Fourteenth Century peers…

Black Plague doctors had indeed had biocide agents in their respirators… Doctors got little infection, and nobles… not at all.

Nobles were socially distant in their castles and well protected from rats and their fleas by armies of domesticated dogs, cats, civettes, hawks, falcons and owls, etc…

No nobles were injured in that Black Plague experiment…

Middle Age authorities imposed blockades on the penalty of instant death from skilled archery… To go from Marseilles to Aix was impossible, as archers had orders to shoot on sight. But the isolation from town to town mostly failed… In the end. But it delayed the pandemic, which took a couple of years to spread from Marseilles, where it arrived by boat, and the rest of Western Europe. Quarantine initially failed, because contaminated goods were allowed on the land, and transmitted disease, even if no human directly did. 

As far as transmission of infection was concerned, much was known: Pericles, 25 centuries ago, was tried for ignoring basic rules against infection, while a “plague” had started in Athens, bringing a relatively enormous loss of lives… In Pericles’ defense that when Athens was besieged… But ha should have anticipated this, as top general, and he recognized he anticipated everything in the war with Sparta, “but not a pandemic”.

Red hot irons were used against infection, and people were injected with smallpox even around 1700… (Very deadly…) Washing hands was more problematic, water was not necessarily clean, they would have had to use wine…

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Friend Ian Miller observed: “So social distancing works!”

Yes! Absolutely! Social distancing is a noble pursuit, it saves lives, civilization, now or in the future, I have ruled aristocratically all my life! But the notion of nobility is deeper and more subtle than usually considered…

Noble, nobilitas actually comes from: *gnobilis, literally “knowable,” from gnoscere “to come to know,”

We owe everything to the most noble instincts, even the flag of the USA. The basic artistic idea comes from the Franks, Seventh Century, let me present to you the Coat of Arms of Charles Martel (who famously crushed two giant Islamist invasions of Francia : 

America is a European colony in more ways than one… And it is the Franks who introduced the concept of “Europe”, in the modern sense…

Plato believed that societies should be ruled by philosopher-kings… But of course that was a self-contradictory notion: A king is a power center of one, an autocrat, fundamentally, even for the best, an assassin. A philosopher is the one who rules over wisdom, that is knowledge, and is, in turn, ruled by them. Fundamentally completely ineffectual at ruling over men.

The most advanced societies should be ruled, not by one self-declared super-smart monkey, as Russia and China are, but should be ruled, not by monkey, but by the best and highest ways, namely the most intelligent ones. “Ways” are those of the multitude, the mores, morality. In other words, the light of the most knowledgeable, the most noble take a long time to reach the multitude.. But that’s how civilization advances. Having one person impose more advanced and clever ways is tempting and can superficially work, as in the cases of Caesar, Clovis, Bathilde, Charlemagne, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, etc. But for one enlightened, progressive ruler, one hundred vicious autocrats blossom (even short term apparent progress, for example Augustus, and many other Roman emperors, is followed by long term disaster). 

The point that Plato forgot, in his hatred of democracy, is that the notion of king, that of physical power on subjects is not… noble, not knowledgeable, as it ignores the blatant ethological fact that humans are not made to be ruled…  

Only knowledge is truly noble.

Knowledge starts with as little as one, it’s true… but new knowledge needs peer review, and is only validated by the multitude.

Forget philosopher-kings. Embrace knowledge,, knowledge of facts, knowledge of logic, knowledge of emotions, knowledge of the crowds… Next we will fustigate Elon Musk’s blatant ageism… and hubris, which reminds us of why, and how plutocracy makes even the best, into evil beasts…. 

Patrice Ayme

The Conspiracy Against The Public Schools Educating Non-Elite Children By The West’s Evil Leaders

Con-spirare: breathing together, what the elite does. Example: private business jets emit 2.5% of the United States CO2. The average passenger in one of these jets emits twenty times more CO2 than the average passenger in commercial jets. Still, business aviation directly employs 1.2 million people in the USA, and has never been bigger. It profits from all sorts of subsidies, from being… free for the wealthy, to not paying taxes on fuel to using air traffic control for free [1]. And what are the so-called climate conscious “Democrats” led by Joe Biden and plutocrat Pelosi doing about it? Nothing, because their future salaries depend upon pleasing the ultra wealthy business jet class. They have breathed together in all too many get-togethers…

Look at Netanyahu, the ex-Israeli PM, still leader of the opposition in Israel: in September Netanyahu was vacationing in Lanai, a gigantic island in Hawaii… the private property of Larry Ellison from Oracle… Who paid 350 million dollars (in the past) for the island from borrowed money (so banks offered Ellison the island with public money, because plutocrats never have enough money and subsidies…).  Ellison also offered Benjamin a fortune to sit on the board of Oracle. I have nothing particularly against Israel and Netanyahu, and we know this because the Israeli media are more aggressive than their US or EU equivalent. Right now if one search engine news about Trump, one finds only news about Trump from his dedicated enemies: the media has been cleansed of anything positive to say about Trump.

Which brings us to the question of public schools, and how public schools got devastated: attendance is down everywhere. Why? Because of the dehumanization.. and pandemic (!) brought by the masks. In the US, at least California, also because of the dehumanization and general stupidification brought by “woke” propaganda.. It got so bad a friend of my daughter since pre-school observed she was learning nothing in seventh grade public school. She was just submitted to kindergarten stuff and propaganda, and she refused to go to school. Her parents had to pull her out and find an online charter school.

Human beings and other advanced animals communicate through facial expression and voice: masks alter both, and dramatically so in the new and fresh human children, therefore malforming their growing brains. 

Some will say the masks could not be avoided. This is a lie: High Efficiency Particle Air HEPA filters, remove viruses (and pollen and bacteria, and PM 2.5 micron particles, from the air… MASKS DO NOT. The virus is too small (less than 100 nanometers) to be stopped by woven plastic only stopping 95% of 300 microns particles. Whereas a HEPA filters achieve lowest efficiency around 300 microns. HEPA filters have a minimum particle collective efficiency of 99.975% for particles of 0.3 µm diameter or more, 150 times more… on the first pass. Pass the air in the HEPA again, and one gets to (150)^2, more than 20,000 times the efficiency of one N95 masks…

Pass air three times through a HEPA filter: at least three million times the efficiency at extracting COVID virus from the air in HEPA filtering relative to a N95 mask!  By choosing masks over HEPA filters, our evil and corrupt leaders have chosen disease over freedom.  

The MASK TRAP: Masks are completely ineffective in closed rooms after a few hours: more people died from COVID under the masked Biden, than under the mostly maskless Trump, in the US, in spite of the Trump vaccines… and because of the Biden obsession with masks.  Biden claims he follows the science, but all he did was attend a masquerade of science. This masked failure is quite clear when one analyzes the first (no masks) versus the second wave of COVID (mandatory masks).

In a school full of masks, my daughter was submitted to two quarantines in her classroom, in just one month, because of COVID cases within her class (she personally did not get it, continual tests showed). COVID was rampant and generalized in that (top) public school, in spite, or rather because, of the stupid masks, in conjunction with the neglect of air quality by the stupid and arrogant administrators…. whom had not enough brains to realize COVID is transmitted by bad air, mask or no mask…

Elite scientist talked about masks as if they were efficient prevention… What about the eyes? Where are the masks to cover the eyes? The virus can also come in, through the eyes… We need to cover those eyes…

So why so much insistence to put the masks on the faces? To dehumanize society, ruin the schools and public education, creating a hateful, sheep-like, resenting, stupid, uneducated populace, growing from children with deformed brains, the way the masters like it… 

And it is working: in my city young people wear mask to jog in the wilderness… especially if they are ethnically Asian (as ⅓ of the children are). Masks have become the new crosses: stupid symbols  one must exhibitto show to the Inquisition that one is good… 

Making people stupid is the number one top priority of truly evil leaders, the sort we have now, facing the greatest potential calamity humanity has ever created… Their job destroying public schools in the USA is a testimony to their diabolical expertise…

Notice that China has applied a different… much more effective policy: children have been going to school, and the science is pushed more as Xi wants tech giants to practice “Deep Science” and stop driving young people crazy with games and silly smartphones (I approve both aims). I do not approve of Xi’s methods, I prefer HEPA filters… But Xi is sure is getting children educated in science and technology… US leaders’ children do not go to public schools. As Harvard explained, the private schools are training the elite… for fired forests, melting ice, and their business class, ruling over the world….

Patrice Ayme 

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 P/S: My daughter now enjoys a superlative school… Not a public one, though..

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[1] Private jets are horribly polluting, 20 times more CO2 per passenger on average. Second, they are outrageously subsidised…

In Europe firms and individuals can avoid paying value-added tax on imported private jets by routing purchases through the Isle of Man. This scheme has cut tax bills by billions of dollars for imports of hundreds of private jets into the European Union since 2011. In the USA individuals and companies write off 100% of the cost of a new or used private jet against their federal taxes. It has made buying a jet extraordinarily cheap for plutocrats… wiping out the entire year’s tax bill, for some. And what is Pelosi doing about it? Well, using private jets, of course…

Users of private jets are also more likely to commit fraud: a careless attitude to the stewardship of the Earth, and common decency extends into outright criminality. That’s an intriguing twist, as world leaders fly private all over: so they get corrupted by this flying. Why would an Israeli MP such as Netanyahu need to leave Israel to go all around the world in a place not that much more south?

Propaganda outfits (New York Times, etc…) have claimed that the SARS 2 CoV19 was the size of a giant virus, to claim it could be stopped by N95 masks at 5% efficiency. Well, that’s a lie. COVID virus is no more than 100 nanometers across… Particles 10 micron across, like forest fire particles, can stay up in the air for months, let alove COVID viruses, 100 times smaller… .

Nietzsche’s Amor Fati Is An Ancient Disaster, Denying Progress and Evolution

Abstract: Nietzsche based his philosophy on a number of axioms, including “Amor Fati” and “Will to Power”. Both are found in animals… but on different occasions: death for the former, life for the latter. The two notions, embracing one’s fate and imposing one’s will, contradict each other in a philosophical system. This riddle is explained when one realizes that Nietzsche was so shattered by the death of god (Nietzsche’s father was a professional godist [0]), he was so inconsolable, that he ended up confusing pure rationality with “Amor Fati”. Pure rationality appeared to Nietzsche like a terrible fate one had to love.  OK, pretty silly. So why to condescend to write this essay? Well, it was a discovery process… And “Amor Fati” dominates as a philosophical system all too much in places where I grew up, and used to be the bane of the Middle Ages… with deplorable results…

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“Amor fati”, love of fate, is just convenient metaphysics for beasts full of endorphins, devoured by dogs. Or for populations submitted to greedy tyrants. Stoicism is amor fati writ large. 

Nietzsche was great in many ways, but also incredibly naïve, stupid and obsolete in others. Nietzsche’s recipe for greatness is “amor fati”? Inconceivably stupid: the recipe for humanity is “plus ultra”, “plus oultre” (Charles Quint!!!) Always was… Going “Meta” in other words, to speak Greek instead of French or Latin… And the importance of the meta concept is why Facebook stole the concept.

Nietzsche, apparently ignorant of North Africa and the Middle East, didn’t know the famous Arabic saying: In sha’Allah (/ɪnˈʃælə/; Arabic: إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ‎, ʾin šāʾa -llāh… If god wants it), embracing fate, is a very old slogan and attitude, and not just Muslim. Worse: “Si Dieu le veut!”, its French version, was the slogan and attitude of all too much of the European Middle Ages…

In recent centuries, the Middle East has been dying from In sha’Allah. In sha’Allah is as old as the Hydraulic Dictatorships of the desiccated Middle East…

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Amor Fati is a philosophy central to the Greco-Roman Stoics (among the ancestors of both Christianism and Islamism). Stoicism is the philosophy of the wise bearing the civilization-terminating dictatorships of the Hellenistic States and ravenous plutocratic and imperial Rome. Epictetus was a philosopher initially in Nero’s closest power circle (as was Seneca, another prominent Stoic, who ruled Rome for 5 years, in the name of his pupil Nero who was still too young to be interested by power… Epictetus was slave to Nero’s secretary, surviving the suicided Seneca…). Here is Epictetus:

“Do not seek for things to happen the way you want them to; rather, wish that what happens happen the way it happens: then you will be happy.”

In other words, say you messed up: just pretend that’s what you wanted to achieve all along. Say you are addicted to some substance: wish that happens some more, you always wanted this.  

In a return to the gutter, Nietzsche made love of fate central to his philosophy. In “Why I Am So Clever” Ecce Homo, section 10, he writes:

“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”

The concept is used elsewhere in Nietzsche’s writings. For example in section 276 of The Gay Science:

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

Nietzsche refers to the “Yes-sayer” as a person who is capable of uncompromising acceptance of reality per se… In other words, Nietzsche wants to embrace a proto-rational, rational, science oriented attitude. But he goes metaphysical in too restricted a way, getting stupid by claiming we should love whatever happens. (In another even more stupid version, Amor Fati is described as “whatever happens, happens”… as if we had a choice in the matter…) 

Indeed, why did prehistoric men do science? Why did prehistoric men try to find out what raw reality was? Because their lives depended upon it! It was not that their lives in academia depended upon it, but their real lives…

Prehistoric men tried to determine what reality was, not to please superiors, and get a bigger house, but for day to day existence, dominating the subjects they needed to dominate for survival. For example the local saber tooth lions’ pride. Nothing promotes rationality better than the will to not become dinner.

In other words, the science oriented mind, embracing reality, evolved and was selected, precisely because looking at things as they are, as much as possible, provides us with power… The ultimate power, survival. Nietzsche did not understand that, and denied evolution: he hated Darwin, and probably in no small measure because evolution denies “eternal recurrence”… the ultimate parody of “Amor Fati”…

Nietzsche was great, highly likeable, his work on Dionysus and Apollo stand… although not as original as those who know only Nietzsche may think… After all, these are Greek inventions… And Jacob Burckhardt pointed out that Renaissance Italy viewed the State as an art form, born of gore and madness, keys to the sublime… And Nietzsche admired Burckhardt… but Nietzsche’s Amor Fati contradicts Renaissance Italy. Amor Fati was useful to Nietzsche, as he was ravaged by disease… But it is mostly useless, even to him, and not original. Curiously, “Amor Fati” contradicted, to some extent, another core of Nietzsche’s work, the “Will to Power”. Now, it is true that, to fully express one’s “Will to Power” one may have to embrace it as fate: the knight in shining armor needs amor fati, not just armor fati…

In his last moments of sanity, Nietzsche embraced a horse who had been flogged by his owner for resisting progress. Nietzsche then cried, and talked to the exhausted animal. Compassion. No Amor Fati there…

Amor Fati evolved as a trait meta-useful to entire ecological systems. Animals have to be devoured so that other animals, generally superior, can, in turn, exist… And they have to let themselves be devoured, to prevent chaotic ecological systems [1]. Amor Fati is a sort of evolution created built-in euthanasia… And this is precisely the law of the jungle humanity evolved to break. 

Patrice Ayme  

 

http://www.shardcore.org/shardpress2019/2011/07/20/nietzsche-and-the-horse-2011/ I love therefore I am…

[0] Racists worry about race, godists worry about god, a dog in the sky…

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[1] The math of this exists, I developed them… The basic idea is that predators are beneficial to prey species (for example by preventing pandemics). So prey species have interest that they would be preyed upon. But that can only work if the prey in its death throes doesn’t insist to kill the predator. Thus the prey, once condemned, is flooded with endorphins, and stop struggling…

“Leading” Corrupts Learning: Top Universities Should Create Learners, Not “Leaders”.

Harvard Or Hard Wart, that is the question… Harvard does not understand the first thing about learning: learning is not leadership. Would-Be “Leaders” Are Not Primarily Learners…

Our mission to educate future leaders is woven throughout the Harvard College experience, inspiring every member of our community to strive toward a more just, fair, and promising world.

[Harvard College.]

“Producing future leaders” as Harvard claims it does, as a most prominent mission, is undemocratic in several ways. First, why are “future leaders” produced there and not somewhere else? Does Harvard have a secret recipe, or is it simply connected to the leadership class? By telling us that our society is dominated by a special class, the “leaders”, which it creates, Harvard College is telling us it has decided, fosters and organizes such a domination by leaders, hence is making propaganda against democracy and is actively educating tomorrow’s tyrants. In other words, Harvard has made Socrates’ choice, and the charge Socrates was condemned to death for: corrupting the youth.

Harvard is proclaiming to the world that it is a mighty oligarchy: we, Harvard, produce the few (oligos) who lead. 

Harvard “University” on the Charles river… Veritas? Completely corrupt…

Second, “democracy” at its root, is people-power… not the power of leaders. The closest notion to leader-power is rule of the few, oligarchy. My objection to academia messing up with “leadership” is philosophical: direct, real democracy has no “leader”, no “guide”, no “Fuhrer”. Academia should study democracy, not aspire to dictatorship over the planet, and view that rule as its supreme mission.

Universities should be learning institutions, not ruling institutions. By claiming to be ruling institutions, universities do not just abdicate their learning mission, but proclaim that ruling is more important than learning.. Learning involves modesty. Arrogantly proclaiming one produces the world’s leaders, although factual, in the case of Hrvard, should be deplorable, not laudable.. .

Third, “leading” brings material advantage: watch prominent US politicians, even, and especially so-called “democrats” basking in immense wealth, of the order of 100 million dollars for Obama… For comparison, the median net worth of US families in 2021 is $122,000… That means that Obama is worth one thousand times more. Other, older “democrats” made even more money: hundreds of millions for the Clintons, Pelosi, and more than a billion for senior California Senator Feinstein…

So “leading” brings material advantages, but learning, per se, does not. Hence focusing on leading, not learning, naturally attracts those dominated by greed, not learning, and thus tribal and “partisan control”, as observed in present academia. Once Nazis were popular at Harvard, when the Nazis were on the way up…  

These apparently esoteric considerations are actually very practical: Harvard played a major role, direct and indirect, in the rise of Nazism. Chinese dictator Xi’s daughter went to Harvard: did that help produce a future leader? Did Xi get some help in clinging to power, thanks to Harvard?

Harvard, by proclaiming its educational role in the present, CATASTROPHIC, world leadership is proclaiming Evil-Power (“pluto-kratia, plutocracy) as the way. Indeed many of those going there are very wealthy or “legacy”, producing first year dropouts like Zuck and Gates (“legacies” have six times the probability of being admitted relative to the average applicant…) Harvard is indeed a plutocratic university, it teaches the inversion of all values at its most basic: learning to confuse learning and leading, curiosity and greed. Some students at Harvard have noticed, even the class president….

Learning is universal, leading, not so much. 

Democracy does not need “leaders”, but learners, a higher sort.

And the motto of planets where civilization survives?

Que nul ne survive, s’il n’est philosophe!

Let no one survive, who is not a philosopher…

Patrice Ayme

Enrolling The Victim In The Crime Beats Blaming the Victim

“Blaming the victim” is an old trick: it is found in Aesop’s fable of the wolf and the lamb… Where shifting the blame is used next, after blaming the victim is found insufficiently persuasive. Yet, looking at history, one sees a much more effective trick, used extremely frequently: enrolling the victim(s) into their own abuse and destruction.

Examples of this method are really legions. It is the same general idea as judo: deflect the power of the opposition, to incite it into lethal trajectories where their get hit by planet Earth…

Examples: The more frequent application of self-abusing the victim is found all over geography and history, when the lower classes implement the rule of the upper classes… Octavian’s army persuading the Roman Senate to put them in power (Augustus would kill or exile many of them later). Persuading the Romans they would save themselves by becoming Catholic sheep, and turning the other cheek… for the Barbarian at the Gates (circa 380s). Persuading countless American Natives to kill other American Natives with a little help from European colonists. Persuading the Russians they were better off with a dictator and a civil war, than a Czar and democratization. Persuading the Germans they would be better off grabbing back Eastern Europe, by going to war, after their war against Western Europe, trying to grab Western Europe, and the result that Western Europe freed Eastern Europe, from Germany .. But this time the Germans would go to war completely unprepared… and rather unwilling… For an even better chance of total destruction of Germany. Another example was enrolling Jews to kill Jews in Nazi extermination camps, periodically killing them all to leave no witnesses (this is related by witnesses in detail in the nearly ten hours long documentary “Shoah“)…

One reason this outrageous method of enrolling victims in abusing themselves works is that cajoling someone into their own destruction is a Big Lie. As Adolf Hitler pointed out in “Mein Kampf“, normal people are used to little lies, but not big ones… So they don’t expect, or even don’t imagine, them… Hence added Hitler, men of great destiny like himself can persuade, with Big Lies, anyone to do anything. Enrolling people into working hard at their own destruction was a Big Lie, and that’s why it worked… For Hitler, until France and Britain declared war to him.

Enrolling people as allies in their own destruction is strong medicine. The enroller is of course completely cynical and deprived of any common decency… But that is besides the point… The point is that it works… Helping people suicide themselves is the nec plus ultra of abuse…

The tyrant can always find an excuse for his tyranny.

The unjust will not listen to the reasoning of the innocent.

The truly vicious will enroll the victim in the crime.

Patrice Ayme

No Stress, No Life! We Stressed, Therefore We Exist

Our ancestors were so stressed, one could say stress was their natural mental state: should they fail, they would be eaten... which was even more stressful. Our ancestors were also very smart, and getting even more so perpetually. Handling stress ever better had everything to do with it… What is “stress”? The notion started as the stress tensor in mechanics and blossomed through an emotional metaphor invented in Middle Age France [1]. Since then “stress” has taken negative connotations… but that is from superficial interpretations of what stress brings.    

It turns out that stress brings everything. The construction of a heart’s valves inside an embryo requires (mechanical) stress (published November 2021, peer reviewed). Actually all morphogenesis is about stress entangled with genetics. Thus stress can be a good, and so constructive, that we owe out existence to stress. 

Thus, when people deplore “stress” it is rather strange. And actually we see plenty of people deliberately engaging in stressful activities, like climbing mountains without any safety except an excellent neurology (I have engaged in this myself… all too much). It is as if stress was necessary to live a full neurological life. And it is! Without enough stress, of the right sort, people miss out big on all what life can be. I generally over-stress myself, several times a week… So-called “weekend warriors” would know what I mean…

That traverse in Yosemite on the Half Dome north face regular route has no protection (except if one wants to stuff mechanical devices in the crack, but that would require much more effort and time, and a supplementary belay at the end of the ledge…. That sounds safer, and yet, the more time and belays, the more one is exposed to things which can go very wrong, like a hail bearing, lightning streaked thunderstorms, and, if not that, one may have to spend one more night on the mountain exposed to the elements, discomfort, thirst… BTW, I was there… But with a rope. Not that one is not in extreme danger, as one could get killed falling, rope or not rope, by the shock or the rope breaking, or the partner following… So one is very stressed. No false move, no moves generating fatigue, etc. Besides, in the interest of speed, one needs to be real concentrated, one is one mile off the deck here, all in one long day, and did I mention quakes? I experienced once a 6 Richter quake in Yosemite… By the way, the climbing just above the visible flake is very hard if one does it free, especially “on sight”. 5-13/8 something delicate face climbing (sometimes it can be aided… not always if one does not have the necessary equipment… which I never brought…) Memories of past stress is a delightful thing… most of the time, but not when one got nearly killed in a very blatant way, of course…

Thus, when people complain about “stress” it may be just from having not enough stress. Maybe stress is like sex: it needs to conclude. In the wild, though millions of years, stress was about being versus horrible death, being eaten alive. So “stress” means fight or flight. Now “stress” may mean one is sitting behind a desk, as one’s prospects in the oligarchy collapse.

But not just that: fight or flight is good… because it stresses the physiology. And even more, stresses the psychology… And that’s good, to live life in full, the way our species is ( the so called “phenotype”).   

Let me explain more: suppose one never exercises. Could one stand up? No. 

Astronauts coming out of the ISS are put on stretchers. Does that mean that standing up is injurious? No. It means simply one gets injured by standing up, when one has not stood up enough. This holds true physically, just as it holds true for human rights.

Prehistoric people were subjected to continual stress. It is as natural as streams of photons. But, without natural light, animals do not learn to see correctly. Same with stress.

Reality inflicts stress on the mind. That’s how and why the mind learns.

And wisdom is? Wisdom is not a being, but a process, embracing better the nature of reality. To embrace better one needs to have better neural networks… and that requires energy to build those networks (and demolish older ones, not as appropriate…)

And it is intrinsically stressful, to force new neural networks, one has to be motivated by fear, greed, thirst, hunger and other strong emotions… and yet, a good thing; the brain needs to exert.

Developing embryos, such as this zebrafish, rely on physical forces to sculpt them into the correct forms, as they grow. 

Morphogenesis and neurogenesis need stress!

No stress, no life!

No stress, no mental supremacy! [2]

Thus, no humanity!

Va de retro, sleepy minds!

Patrice Ayme

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[1]. Stress, starting circa 1300, was used to mean “hardship, adversity, force, pressure,” through Old French  estrece “narrowness, oppression,” meta-imaging from Latin strictus “tight, compressed, drawn together,” past participle of stringere “draw tight”.

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[2] Black Lies Matter types object deeply to lots of words and notions, especially “supremacy”… They apparently opt for a world where all are inferior… except their masters, of course, the ones who own media and universities… So I added “supremacy”, just in the hope of stressing them out, as a community service, to help them improve their otherwise opposite-of-supreme minds…

Most Of History Is The History Of Conspiracies. Those Who Deny It, Deny Oligarchy. Often Because They Belong To It.

Con-spirare means simply together-breathe. Conspiracies are even more frequent that the oligarchies they enable. Oligarchies are organized by individuals so close to each other, that they breathe together. Oligarchs also dine together, have parties together, play various games together, love together, marry together, do business exclusively with each other, etc. If oligarchies want to stay in power, they have to deny that there are such collusions, because smart people would attribute the unjust power of oligarchies to such collusions, instead of more meritorious circumstances. So dutifully, little scholars in the employ of oligarch condemn “Conspiracy Theory“, to satisfy their employers and get treats like the greedy pigeons they are… To boot, the employees of oligarchy accuse common people of being racist. Conspiracy Theory is out, say the conspirators, Race Theory is in, instead. Amusingly, said conspirators ted to be always of the same “race”… 

So oligarchies deny conspiracies exist. Instead they prefer to attribute their success to “God”, a great dog in the sky, or chance, or… merit… not the application of groupthink, group discrimination, and group plots… All all too close to plain old racism not to muster  a putrid odor…

Yet, conspiracies exist, history is full of them. Conspiracy is a more general notion than the notion of “plot”, with which it is often confused by lesser minds. A plot necessitates a conspiracy. A conspiracy does not necessarily entail a plot. Conspiracies, like elites socializing together, do not necessarily create explicit plots. 

Oligarchies bind through conspiracies and act through plots. Consider for example Julius Caesar: his entire life was spent fending off, or organizing conspiracies, sometimes for excellent reformist reasons (his distribution law in 59 BCE, when Caesar, as Consul, worked directly with the People Assembly, so-called Centuriate Assembly, ignoring the Senate which led to hatred which brought diverse plots, including civil  war and Caesar’s assassination…).. 

One of the oldest documents in the world, engraved in stone by pharaoh Ramses III describes a “conspiracy of the Sea People in their islands” (Sicily, Sardinia, etc.) which destroyed most civilizations (Egypt barely survived and enslaved an entire invading army.. Israel appeared a bit later…) 

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Here is a more detailed example:

RUSSIA, LAND OF CONSPIRACIES, FROM IVAN THE TERRIBLE TO PUTIN…

Peter the Great was born in 1672. His reforms, battles and conquests had a lasting modernizing impact on Russia, as he firmly intended. Many institutions, and conquests, of Russia originate from his reign. He adopted the title of Emperor in place of the old title of Tsar in 1721, founded and developed a Navy and the city of Saint Petersburg, which remained the capital of Russia until 1917. A year before his death from pneumonia after bathing in a river in the middle of winter, Peter founded the first Russian university. Peter spent his entire life fighting lethally against opponents who preferred death to Peter’s far-sighted reforms. Many of these opponents were extremely close to Peter, and he publicly executed some of them from his own hand, arguing with them even during their execution. One can say Peter had to, because the conspirators were so fanatical and kept on going, like demented energy bunnies, until death stopped them.

Like many children of European monarchs, Tsaverich Alexey Petrovich, son of Czar Peter the Great, didn’t often see his father, who spent much of his reign away fighting the Ottomans and Swedes and traveling around Western Europe to instruct himself. Instead, Alexei was surrounded by a Moscow entourage that believed in “less westernization and a bigger role for the Orthodox Church, the aristocracy, and the old ways”. Alexei bathed in conspiracies of those vested in the obsolete and Russia-defeating ways that Peter had fought against for his entire life, in continual life and death struggles.

Still a boy, under the secret and forbidden influence of his banned mother, Alexey once swore to his confessor Jacob Ignatiev, that he wished his father’s death; the confessor answered: “God will forgive you; we all wish him dead because there are too many burdens on the people” (Impositions of Czar Peter such as cutting beards and removing boots while sleeping…). The confessor spent enormous time with Alexey, often in drunken feasts of equally minded oligarchs. 

Peter wrote to Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, in the hope of recovering his son Alexey, who had fled to Germany and then Napoli, yes, in Italy, part of the “Roman” empire: …”a friendly fraternal confession to share it with you, namely, about my son Alexey. Some time ago the Prince received a command to come to me so that I could distract him from indecent living with indecent people. But instead he hid somewhere and I can’t find him. For his sake I ask your Majesty that if he is found secretly or explicitly in your areas, he should be ordered to return to me…”

Peter’s son returned to Russia. After adverse testimony from his own pregnant lover, Alexay ended tortured to death (that was presented to the public as “died of sadness”)_. And on it went: the rest of the history of Russia is a succession of conspiracies, plots and coups. The consequences could be serious: when Elizabeth, daughter of Peter and  Czarina for twenty years was on the verge of winning against Prussia and Britain in 1761, she died and her nephew who succeeded her, and admirer of Frederik II, immediately withdrew from the war, and Prussia-Britain won, with consequences such as the loss of America for France, and Nazism for Germany…      

Nearly two meters tall Peter the Great was painted when he visited London, by the same painter who painted Newton and Locke… Peter nearly caused the court of France to faint when he grabbed the child king Louis XV, at Versailles, and brought him up in the air to embrace him… His serious purpose was to study European high tech, and he worked in Dutch shipyards. Later he duplicated the ship making in Russia, building Russia’s first Navy, and a mighty one…

All historical figures were involved in conspiracies and plots. This is true even of intellectuals. Live conspiracies and plots are themselves covered up by other conspiracies, plots and propaganda… it reminds me of renormalization in Quantum Field Theory… The apparent masses and charges are not the real masses and charges, and the more detailed the analysis, the more different… Exactly as QFT has it, and for similar reasons… This is an interesting case where state of the art physics provides a ready-made example of how refinement of analysis changes the analysis itself.

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ENABLING THE NAZIS, AND THUS THE HOLOCAUST OF WORLD WAR TWO WAS A CONSPIRACY: However, that was (greatly) a US Deep State conspiracy, and those are generally protected from revelation by overlaying layers of other conspiracies (Why? “Revelation” in Greek is “apocalypse...). So there is another conspiracy to cover-up the fact that Hitler was enabled by a US cover-up. That cover-up, itself enabled by its own set of lies, is called “isolationism”.

Before 1942, Roosevelt, other top US politicians and the US media conspired to hide from the US public the holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. To do so, FDR fired his friend Dodd, a University of Chicago historian. Dodd had been FDR’s ambassador in Berlin, who was extremely well informed and extremely anti-Nazi. The story is told in “The Garden Of The Beasts“, by Erik Larson, an excellent book.

Then FDR named another pro-fascist plutocrat (Jo Kennedy) as ambassador to London… and argued with Hitler for years… thus validating and recognizing Hitler as an interlocutor… when there was just one way for civilization to talk to Hitler, war, and it was precisely what France and then Britain, decided to do. Because they had to, there was no alternative. For the US Deep State, the one centered around Harvard, Nazism was the key to world control…. And indeed the stupid Nazis sent a battleship to Boston to celebrate Harvard! I say “stupid”, because it did not dawn on the Nazis what the American Deep State was exactly up to… namely a bait and switch similar to the one of 1914-18 (first pro-German, and Germany enabling, then anti-German). The Nazis… and Europe… would have gained from making a more in depth analysis of what exactly the US powers-that-be were exactly up to… while they helped Nazi Germany (not just to exist and go to war, but even to bring Nazism to power…)

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A few glimpses of functioning, multi-generational conspiracies:

The mother of the present US Secretary of State was elevated to “Commandeur” of the French Legion of Honor (it’s a supreme grade of the Legion d’Honneur, above Chevalier, which means knight, to which some mainstream US journalist were also elevated, like Roger Cohen…). So was the Sec of State’s stepfather Pisar (at the highest possible level of Legion d’Honneur…)… All US citizens, not French… But somehow at the core of the inner machinery of… France… Donald Mayer Blinken (born November 11, 1925) is an American businessman and former ambassador. He was a director and one of the founders of E. M. Warburg Pincus & Company, an investment bank in New York…. Easy enough, when one is a scion of the Warburg banking family… During the Weimar Republic, Max Warburg served on the board (‘Generalrat’) of the Reichsbank from 1924 to 1933, under Hjalmar Schacht, (until 1930). Dr. Schacht, himself a pawn of JP Morgan (secretly tied to Rothschild), was the financial master mind of fascizing Germany in the 1920s and 1930s… thus Wall Street… and Hitler… most important promoter. Schacht was Hitler finance and economy minister. A monster scandal, severely repressed, happened when, shortly after Hitler got to power, and when Nazi rule was not yet firm, a book revealed that the Warburg, German-American Jews, had financed Hitler. The book was ordered destroyed by “judges” everywhere… Just one copy survived… Yet there are plenty of reasons to believe in its overall message, that Hitler had secret backers (it’s even possible a family member of the Warburgs wrote the book as a warning against Hitler… [1])

Hey no oligarchies here, nothing to see, please do not ask too many questions… Pisar’s clients included many Fortune 500 companies, celebrities, and many known political and business leaders of the 20th and 21st century, including some notorious ones: tycoons Hammer and Maxwell, French and US presidents. His books have been translated into many languages. Pisar was the longtime lawyer, confidant of ill-fated plutocrat Robert Maxwell a plotter so great that, at his burial after he mysteriously “feel” from his yacht of the Canaries, the Israeli PM solemnly declared he could never say all the services he rendered, they were top secret…

https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/legion-d-honneur-la-liste-des-promus-du-14-juillet-2021-20210714.

Another glimpse:

Congo has 2/3 of the world’s cobalt (for so-called “renewable”, actually intermittently clean energy). In 2021, most Congolese mines are Chinese owned (19 out of 25). Some of these mines are so enormous, cities have sprung next to them. The purchase by the Chinese of a giant American-owned Cobalt mine in Congo was done by a private equity firm with Hunter Biden, son of Biden, on its board… as a founding member… As in the Warburg cases, a number of companies were created to use as screens for plausible denials (plausible only to very friendly media breathing the same air and going to the same receptions…)

Race to the Future: What to Know About the Frantic Quest for Cobalt. A New York Times investigation examines the global demand for raw materials as the clean energy revolution takes off. This is what we found.

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Rage against “Conspiracy Theory” is something intellectuals employed by plutocratic university seem to view as a duty to demonstrate how much they support the established oligarchy. After all, their self-respect and a crucial part of the propaganda they project depends upon denying that they belong to anything else, but an oligarchy of merit. Typical is this October 2021 declaration from a particle physics theorist:

“Conspiracy theory would be hysterically funny if it weren’t so widespread and so incredibly dangerous. Today it threatens democracy, human health, and world peace, among many other things. In the internet age, scientists and rational bloggers will have no choice but to take up arms against it on a regular basis.” (Professor Strassler claimed to be all angry against silly people who believe there was some conspiracy about how one represented the activity of La Palma’s volcano… Because they are unused to digital data… But in truth he seems to have been more interested in fustigating so-called and non-defined “Conspiracy Theory“) Strassler is a specialist of QFT, Quantum Field Theory… Hey dear professor Strassler, visiting scholar at great intellectual Harvard university, please define “Conspiracy Theory”? (Strassler is an excellent physicist…). Curious how much Harvard keeps on resurfacing, the naïve may say… But it is no accident whatsoever: the daughter of Xi, Chinese president, went to Harvard to, to learn to think oligarchically, lest she didn’t know how to do that very well already… Harvard is the leading plutocratic university. History may well vomit on it… As the place where misleading the world was taught. Yes, Obama became a genius at Harvard, blossoming later as a disaster for health care and the climate, the CO2 crisis, and world peace… Although magnificent propaganda has persuaded hundreds of millions of poorly informed victims… of the exact opposite, a testimony to plutocratic brainwashing…

Now of course Strassler thinks probably the world of Blinken, son of Blinken, stepson of Pisar the Great… Who mysteriously went from gangsters of a pillar of the world, in a few years (family connections did it)… And that’s the entire point. Strassler wants us to not doubt Bilken and his ilk, and their oligarchy-given right to lead the world establishment (into the wall, but hitting a wall should calm the commons). Strassler is trying to seduce his superiors at harvard to get what the pigen wants: more crumbs from the masters.

Right, Blinken went to Harvard (what else?). So now Blinken, family connected to Warburg connected to Hitler (one way or another) has the right and duty to steer the world: he was born that way. And us, who see that see what should not be seen and theorize about what one should not theorize. Some will scoff, and say that it was always that way, and always will be. But that is incorrect thinking: we are in exceptional times, with an on-going Sixth Mass Extinction, the preceding one was 66 million years ago… and we are led by… abject conspirators. They are abject, because they feel, in their infamy, that they are qualified to feel, think and act in the name of the world… And they have obviously been making a terrible job at it (from thousands of nukes threatening to blow us all any time, to a dismantling, deconstructioning climate and imploding biosphere).

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History is not restricted to conspiracies: natural events and vast economic, ecological and sociological forces also arise. But most of the human actions launched by leaders and oligarchies are enacted by conspiracies. 

Denying the necessity of making theories of conspiracies is denying the necessity of studying history as a science… precisely to study plots and conspiracies and how to prevent them… Denying conspiracies is what oligarchies need to exist, to breathe together… In peace… to digest us in peace.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: New York Times has written many essays deploring “conspiracies theories”. Condemning theories about conspiracies as a mental disease destroying “democracy” is a staple of the NYT. The last one was yesterday, 11/22/2021. I sent a comment to the last of these essays explaining the difference between plots and conspiracies, and the ubiquitousness of conspiracies in history. My comment was delayed overnight, and published only after the comment section had been closed.

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[1] Franz von Papen once a German Chancellor (in 1932) and Hitler’s colleague (in 1933) recommended the Warburg book in his memoirs that were published in 1953… The book was also said to have got the help of French intelligence which desperately tried to show the US-Nazi ties… a strategy which may have backfired as early as 1933, when FDR took a detestation of France…

USA Continues To Lead Wrong On Climate, More Than Ever… Agreeing With Greta?

The question is not what fossil fuels do to us. The question is what would we do without them. Answer: not enough, not even enough to install the intermittent “renewables”, and their indispensable complement, hydrogen.

It takes 3.6 billion tons of CO2, roughly ten percent of the world CO2 production, to undertake all the mining we need now to operate civilization. Said mining will augment when extracting minerals for the ELECTRIC ECONOMY,

Some smart ass declared that we extract more tonnage of fossil fuels now than we would by extracting minerals for electricity. Irrelevant. First of all, fossil fuels mostly extract themselves. Whereas minerals extraction requires huge tailings and, or strip mining. Examples are strip mining for lignite, the most polluting coal, in Germany. German lignite extraction is one of the Earth’s most formidable, and most disgusting spectacle… and tar sands in Canada (an even greater monstrosity). Both Germany and Canada pose as ecological saints… when in truth, they are pretty disgusting as national policies… Notwithstanding good ecologist provinces like Quebec, thanks to huge hydro.

Extracting metals and lithium is another matter. Lithium extraction requires humongous quantities of sulfuric acid, thousands of trucks per week in a typical lithium mine as the one authorized by Trump in Nevada… to the horror of hypocritical US ecologists who prefer to devastate China than America…

So, to create the renewable industry, so called, we need NEW clean, low carbon energy, before we have the renewables…And we also need new low carbon base energy… and there is only one, nuclear (under various forms: 4th generation, Thorium, fusion, etc.)!

In answer to Greta Thunberg@GretaThunberg”…the [US] administration prepares to hold the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history on Nov. 17.”The USA continues to “lead on climate”…

Meanwhile. power hungry John Kerry, the US energy Czar, said that he would resign if Biden asked OPEC+ to increase production for more than 5 years (Biden did not evoke a date). That is disingenuous, a lie, or amazingly stupid. Indeed…

Oil leases are never coming under exploitation any faster than a five-ten year horizon… They require huge investments. Now these investments are discouraged, worldwide. This is why the price of fossil fuels is going up, feeding worldwide inflation. That would self-correct… If nuclear was developed enough to be a replacement as base energy… but it’s not. 51 nuclear reactors are under construction (2/3 of them delayed) .. We would need thousands of reactors as base energy… To compete as replacement for electricity alone… This absence of competition and investments, combined, will force fossil fuel prices up. Coal is now restricted by supply, not demand (India wants more coal, it’s apparently not polluted enough…)

China reported the day after the end of the COP-OUT 26 UN conference in Scotland, that its coal production surged to its highest level in years… While officials in India’s capital< New Delhi, readied a lockdown due to air pollution… This shows that the world doesn’t give a hoot to the lies from the most developed countries about combating global warming… Just after the end of a landmark U.N. conference, China, Russia, India and Brazil, about half of humanity are saying: we will espouse your rhetoric, but we know very well that you exported your dirty work in our countries, and you are tongue in cheek with all this CO2 blah blah blah…. And you know that we know that you know what you are up to…

Welcome to Jurassic park!

Patrice Ayme

There are thousands of off shore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. US has thousands, Mexico has thousands… My own, Africa born dad got one of these monsters to explore for off shore oil off Senegal. It was an exploration platform, so it was even bigger. The oil was found, and there was a lot of it, below salt domes… But was too thick to SELF-EXTRACT. So Senegal stayed poor. The platform, heavier than the Eiffel Tower, was then dragged to Gabon, and found exploitable oil there… making Gabon very wealthy…

European Union: Stress It To Build It Better

Poland is right to fight back and asserts that the supremacy of its democracy trumps… the fascist European Union machinery which has sneaked in, during recent decades...

On European construction: One has to look at how European institutions evolved… Often sneakily, newly created power centers arrogated some powers… The European Court of Justice and the like are examples… Those powers can be dialed back, and should be abrogated.

 

Britain, a major power, had to push back and ignore the EU and fascist Parisian oligarchs where they stepped out of line. Instead, Britain fled… with nowhere to go… 

 

Poland, also a major and willful power, is doing that a lot, not respecting “EU”… “law”… and I like it.

 

In the migrant crisis, in the last few days, Poland, correctly so, told the EU and NATO to get lost, and stayed firmly in charge. The Poles explained they would not use European organization such as the EU’s Frontex (the EU frontier police), because Poland did not want to lose control of its border, at some future date, the Polish government declared, a legitimate reason .

 

That’s how Europe is built for the better: by pushing back against fascism, not just quitting… Like a scared rabbit the way the UK did. Britain could have done a lot to sabotage and destroy aspects of the EU it legitimately did not like. Because it would have been legitimate, Britain would have won.

 

In the basic spirit of the European Union, local democracy should stay paramount. Yes, many EU partisans claim that it is not so, that the “EU” (whatever that means) overrules local democracy… But that’s not the case either in logic, history or founding documents. And, in practice the EU obeys tiny Alpine Swiss Cantons, as it should. And Switzerland is not even formally in the EU…

In the grander scheme of things, one may wonder what’s wrong with Europe. How come US president Trump financed European COVID vaccines before the EU did? How come supreme Brexiter Boris Johnson financed a French COVID vaccine, and neither France, nor the EU financed said vaccine?

More generally, Europe is falling off the cliff technologically… And does not seem to mind. How come?

The Brexiters promised gigantic scientific budgets, as if they were China… Where are they? (Biden did the same, promising ten billions for supplementary science; when he signed the “structure” bill, those ten billion dollars of supplementary funding had shrunk to 998 millions… although there was still 7.5 billion in subsidies for the wealthy’s electric cars…).

 

China, ironically enough, has espoused the European scientific-technological Zeitgeist of the Nineteenth Century…. That’s, of course, excellent… But why did Europe abandon it? 

From “Postmodernism”? Perverse and deranged postcolonialism? Anti-progress mentality (look at all the anti-vaxxers explaining the COVID vaccines are a plot to kill humanity…)? Plain anti-intellectual laziness? Don’t laugh: the Nazis were intellectually lazy, it tired them so much to think, they did whatever… As long as it caused mayhem, that was OK… 

In 1939, Poland stood courageously against Hitler. The alliance with the French Republic was activated and Britain followed… Polish Prime Ministers (one of them on the right) enjoy reminding German Kanzlers (one of them on the left, unkindly labelled as “Merkler” by yours truly, more than once…) that Poland would have a much larger population had it not been decimated by Germany… in 1939-1945… Accordingly the Lisbon Treaty gave a heavier vote weight than one would expect by just looking at Poland’s population…

Confronted to all this European decay, Brexiters are keen to brandish democracy, and proclaim that they are not scared rabbits because their ancestors finally joined France in resisting Hitler in 1939… something the US. seduced by the racism of Nazism and the profits it brought… did not do.

However, that’s pretty much irrelevant… and the details are much less glorious. The military effort of France and Britain in 1939-1940 rested mostly on France. The British army was no more than 300,000, evacuated at Dunkirk because the French First army held the perimeter against the entire German army. In 1939-40, the French army was more than five million (it rebounded in a Nazi-invasion army of 1.2 million in 1944-45…).

In 1939, the French were on the frontline. The British, not so much. The first British soldier took one month to reach the frontline.
The breakthrough at Sedan on May 13, 1940, was rendered possible because the Second British armored division had not arrived yet (it was supposed to back up a French reservist B division of “crocodiles“, old men full of wrinkles, hence their nicknames). Had that division arrived, with its excellent Mathilde tanks, the Nazi breakthrough at Sedan would not have happened.
The French 55th B division faced three panzer divisions on two fronts, plus the elite Gross Deutschland regiment, and the entire Luftwaffe. Still, Nazi engineers had to use suicide attacks…

Then of course there was the Battle of Britain, where the Royal Air Force saved Britain… But some of the pilots were Polish, and the Luftwaffe had already experienced gigantic losses during the Battle Of France, two months prior… Some of the best German pilots were dead already…
Poland is achieving in 2021 what Britain did not have the guts to do before Brexit: fight back against all sorts of European fascist declinist idiots (who make Biden look like a genius). Meanwhile, Britain, as it should, is joining European institutions such as the “Horizon” program…

Brexit is never done, because it will never happen. UK is already trying to get back in (consider the “Horizon” program…) Trying in and out at the same time. A kind of sex maybe for old impotent men?

Patrice Ayme

Confusing Fundamental Research in Biotech And Greed, The Biden Administration Is.

 The Biden administration argues that, because the US government (under Trump) wisely gave ten billion dollars to the biotech startup MODERNA for researching and developing its successful COVID mRNA vaccine, and because US government scientists employed by NIH collaborated at some point in some ways with MODERNA scientists, the US government co-owns the MODERNA Patent. Weirdly. Biden and company have asked MODERNA to share its technology with the world. MODERNA has applied for a US Patent, but has also said it would not assert its patent rights. MODERNA has 20 billion dollars of contracts with various governments for vaccine deliveries at this very moment for 2022. mRNA vaccines are expensive to produce at this point, and cost up to 20 more to produce than simpler cold virus based vaccines such as the J&J or AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine [1]…

mRNA vaccines are sci-fi tech, but they do not penetrate the nucleus, differently from other vaccines… That makes them lighter on the body, so to speak, but also make the immunity they provide less sturdy than the one provided by vaccines using cold viruses as carrier of the adverse spike proteins…

There is major confusion between foundations and applications in the case of asking Moderna to pay for fundamental research made, or not, by NIH scientists.

One has to distinguish fundamental research, mostly motivated by the thirst for knowledge, and applied research, greatly, or mostly, motivated by financial profit. Major countries fund fundamental research, precisely because it is not profitable. By definition of “fundamental”, that research is NOT for profit. A profit motive would mean, by definition, a shorter vision, thus defeating the search for foundations. . 

Aerospace companies in the US (and overseas) profited from NASA research. None paid back NASA. Institutions similar to NASA, or NIH, or NSF, NCAR, USGS, DOE, DARPA, DOD, HHS and their foreign peers have to depend upon government funding to guarantee their will to foundational research. French government financed scientists discovered optical pumping (lasers!) and mRNA. There was no cash pay-back. No cash payback was anticipated, none given. The inventions of the , masers, lasers, and mRNA vaccines, among other things, are payback enough.

To insist on a payback for fundamental research is to guarantee a switch from foundational research to for-profit research, something which defeats the mission.

The most expensive government research adventure is ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, financed by 35 governments (including US, EU, China). No pay back required in cash: the discovery itself is the compensation. Europe’s CERN, a fundamental physics organization, has 39 participants (including Russia and the US).

Humanity has to learn to not just be motivated by profit, but also by the pursuit of life, happiness, and curiosity. Saving lives should be rewarding enough.

So let startups be startups, fanaticized by greed and all-out investing: we need them too, to go from abstract knowledge to effective technology. An example is NASA, which was the first to land rockets (LEM on the Moon, later Delta rocket). NASA, paralyzed by analysis, limited budgets, and massive federal and local government interference, couldn’t made anything out of it. Elon Musk a South African greed fanatic of sorts, though, having inherited from his adventurously wealthy father, a no-holds barred approach, crashed all the rockets needed to succeed in the new craft of landing spacecrafts… Nobody believed it could be done, a fortiori profitably, but greed has its way that the past did not have. Now Musk’s Space X is colonizing the space economy…

When MODERNA launched, more than a decade ago, with its French CEO, nobody believed that its mission, using mRNA vaccines to fight cancer could work. Whereas NASA had demonstrated rocket landings in the 1960s, mRNA vaccines had failed in France (where mRNA was discovered) in the 1990s…

If we want mRNA technology to work, we better not destroy its pioneer… Biden may feel differently… But he should remember his beloved elder son Beau, an attorney, elected politician, and Iraq war veteran, died of an unstoppable brain tumor.

In 2010, Beau suffered a stroke, probably caused by a brain tumor. Three years after the stroke, while on vacation, Beau Biden was admitted to M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston after suddenly feeling weak and disoriented. A small brain lesion was located and removed from his brain. He was subsequently diagnosed with brain cancer later in 2013. He underwent treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation to combat the cancer.

Sadly, Beau died at 46 years old, in May 2015. It remains unclear exactly what took Beau’s life. There is still a question of whether it was a primary brain tumor (originating in the brain) or a secondary brain tumor (spreading from another place in the body). In normal times, all sorts of mechanisms, many immunological, deal with cancer cells. But some cancers are not destroyed, the immune system doesn’t recognize them as dangerous. This is what MODERNA’s mRNA approach wants to fix.

The mRNA approach will turn the human cells into factories to make more than one million proteins. We could even imagine some of these designed to carry some incapacitating factor, and going to glue themselves on cancer sells… Thus fabricating a defense system within…

Last, not least: the private sector is spending billions trying to develop Quantum Computing. However this research is entangled with governments’ public funding of research in the foundations of Quantum Mechanics over the last 125 years… This would be a crucial scientific advance, if it is made to work… But the corporations which spend these billions would be upset if they felt that the governments would ask for some payback, just because governments’ scientists cooperated with said corporations…

Yet, this kind of dreadful feeling is permeating all of biotech now: biotech stocks, that means their financing, are in a bear market, down a third in the average, ever since Biden and company made their ludicrous claims… In other words, investing in better health is way down. Way to go, Biden! You call that progress?

Patrice Ayme

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[1] mRNA vaccines have been successful against Ebola. However, in the case of COVID cold virus based vaccines are more suitable for the poorest half of the world’s population: not only are they up to 20 times cheaper, but they also provide better long term immunity (latest research, November 2021…)