Socrates A Poisonous, Unexamined Fascist?

The Pathos Of Truth Seeked & Violated. Unexamined Fascist, Unexamined Prostitute? Both. Why Was That Covered Up, So Long? For The Same Exact Cause Which Made Socrates Famous!

The death of Socrates keeps haunting philosophy. And that, per se, is a sad, yet very revealing tale. The old common wisdom was that Socrates died, as a martyr to truth (as Hypatia, Boetius, Giordano Bruno, and many others certainly did). You want a hero for philosophy? Pick Jean Cavaillès. In the presence of Cavaillès, Sartre nearly wetted his pants. We will see that the mood behind Socrates’ actions is significantly different. Socrates was on the side of those who killed Cavaillès.

Indeed, a casual look at the basic setup of Socrates’ trial contradicts the theme that Socrates was mostly a martyr for truth. Socrates was simply accused to be the mastermind of the young dictators who ruled Athens after her tremendous defeat, and half annihilation. Socrates was also mentor, friend and lover (!) of the young Alcibiades who, deprived of a generalship by Athens, then betrayed her for her lethal enemy, fascist, ultra-racist Sparta.

Agreed, philosophy needs heroes, and has plenty. Here is one:

Jean Cavaillès, Anti-Fascist Martyr. Here Is A Hero For Truth & Philosophy. Socrates Was Nearly The Exact Opposite.

[Jean Cavaillès was tortured and assassinated by the Gestapo in 1943-1944. He is buried in the crypt of the Sorbonne.]

Thus Socrates was a sort of Charlie Manson of serial traitors and killers, whose mental actions led, or accompanied, Athens’ near-death experience in losing a devastating war, and the resulting dictatorship by Socrates’ students. Temples of democracy such as Britain, France, and the USA have gaily executed traitors, or incompetents, for much less than that.

Socrates Used To Look At People As A bull Does. Ugly Inside Out? To Reveal the Truth, Some Will Say Torture Works Even Better

Stanford political science and classics professor, Josiah Ober opines in “The Civic Drama Of Socrates’ Trial” that:  “Conventional wisdom sees Socrates as a martyr for free speech, but he accepted his death sentence for a different cause… In his influential interpretation The Trial of Socrates (1988), the US journalist-turned-classicist I F Stone saw this trial as an embattled democracy defending itself. In Stone’s view, Socrates had helped to justify the junta’s savage programme of oligarchic misrule and was a traitor. More commonly, Socrates is seen as a victim of an opportunistic prosecutor and a wilfully ignorant citizenry. In truth, politics is indispensable to understanding the trial of Socrates, but in a slightly more sophisticated way.”

I love sophistication, philosophy is all about increased sophistication (so is science). Sophistication, translated, is wisdomization: sticking to reality ever better by ever more subtle, complex logic.

The point was not so much that Socrates justified the savage programme, but that he formed the minds who organized said programme, “corrupting the youth”. And he was at it again, even after being amnestied. Professor Ober describes the problem well (although he fails to fathom the enormity of what he describes).

Stanford’s Josiah: “For what people today call ‘the wisdom of crowds’, Socrates had nothing but scorn. Athenian democrats who argued that the many, the group, were collectively more likely to get important matters right than any individual expert earned his antipathy. Whether or not anyone actually was expert in the art of politics, Socrates certainly supposed that there could be such an expert, and that the Athenians were deluded in thinking themselves collectively wise.”

The “experts” would have been naturally his rich, best (“aristos”) boyfriends. Professor Ober is led to the obvious question, but fail to recognize that he does not answer it:

“How did Socrates both scorn the idea of collective wisdom and yet maintain obedience to Athens’ laws, even when he disagreed with how they were interpreted? The rudimentary answer lay in the foundation that Athens (as opposed to, for example, Sparta) provided in its laws and political culture. Athens mandated liberty of public speech and tolerance for a wide range of private behaviour.”

Yes, but public incompetence could lead to trial (as happened to Pericles and many strategoi, generals and admirals). Anyway, that is not an answer. I will give a better answer: Socrates himself had no answer to his drastic self-contradictions, so hise self-delusion fatally committed him to self-destruction. Yet political science professor Ober sees the problem:

“By 399 BCE, however, four years after the end of the tyranny, and with Socrates doing the same things in public that had seemingly inspired the junta’s leaders, the Athenians regarded his speech very differently. In the eyes of the majority of his fellow citizens, Socrates was no longer an eccentric with potential for contributing to public life. He was now either a malevolent public enemy, or deluded and dangerously unable to recognise that his speech predictably produced seriously bad outcomes. And so the way was left open for Meletus to launch his prosecution.”

Right. What professor Ober fails to mention is that only the intervention of mighty Sparta prevented Athens’ annihilation after she surrendered, having lost already half of her population (other cities wanted to do to Athens what Athens did to Melos). Try to imagine this: the city-state half annihilated, democracy destroyed by Socrates’ students, and then? The strongest mood that Socrates had been instilling was to oppose democracy. And he was again at it, after the amnesty he had profited from. What could motivate such a rage?

Unsurprisingly, Socrates was put on trial for “corrupting the youth and impiety”. (The City was to some extent divinized, with Athena as her protecting goddess.)

“With unsettling metaphors and logical demonstrations, he made it clear that he [Socrates] opposed democracy… Xenophon implies that Socrates chose that sort of speech as a method of jury-assisted suicide: he was… tired of life and allowed the Athenians to end it for him.”

This is what I believe. And I go further than Xenophon, by explaining the cause of Socrates’ depression. Socrates may have been tired of his own contradictions.And may have been ravaged by regret. (Regret, I reckon, is a powerful human instinct.)

The Socrates’ worship interpretation is due to Plato. It poses Socrates as martyr to civic duty. But, as it turns out, “civic duty”, for Socrates, seems to be mostly blind obedience to “the Laws”, while viciously criticizing the Direct Democracy which gave birth to them.

That Socrates respected the laws of Athens while despising the Direct Democracy which had passed them is illogical in the extreme. Yes, I know Socrates said he respected “the Laws”, as if they were disembodied gods with a life of their own. But We The People passed said laws, and they lived only because We The People had created them, and We thge People could extinguish them just the same.

The “Laws” were nothing. We The People was everything. Socrates behaved as if he could not understand that.

Insisting that the Laws were everything reveals that the concept of blind obedience was more important to Socrates than arguing about the nature of what one should be obeying to, and why. Blind obedience is also the traditional ultimate value of standard fascism: law and order as supreme.

Blind obedience had been what the junta’s rule was all about. What the rule of Socrates’ young students and lovers had been all about. That’s also what fascism is all about. However, arguing, debating, fighting is how to get to the thorough examination necessary for the “examined life”.   

The contradiction was, and is, blatant. Socrates’ mental system was shorting out. Socrates had been shorting out for half a decade or more: he ambitiously wanted to “examine life”, but he could not even examine the minds of his followers, let alone his own, or why he was hanging around them. Why was he hanging around them? They were rich, he was not, but he lived off their backs and crumbs. And the feeling of power they provided with (after Obama got to power I saw some in his entourage becoming drunk with power).  

Arguably, Socrates was a martyr to fascism, a Jihadist without god. There is nothing remarkable about that. The very instinct of fascism is to give one’s life, just because fanatical combat is the ultimate value, when one gets in the fascist mood. In this case, the fanatical combat was against We The People.

Posing Socrates as a martyr for intellectual freedom is farfetched: fascism, blind obedience, passion for oligarchs are all opposed to the broad mind searching for wisdom requires.

Some will sneer: you accuse Socrates to be a fascist, why not a racist? Well, I will do this too. The golden youth Socrates loved so much and drank with were hereditary so. Socrates believed knowledge was innate (so an ignorant shepherd boy knew all of math: this is the example he rolled out!) If knowledge was innate, one can guess that the “aristos”, the best, were also innately superior. That is the essence of racism.

Logically enough, Socrates disliked science: nothing was truly new under the sun (as all knowledge was innate). So much for examining life.

It is more probable that Socrates was indeed, just a stinging insect buzzing around, stinging the idea of Direct Democracy. In exchange, his rich, young, plutocratic boyfriends would fete and feed him. Such was Socrates’ life, a rather sad state of affair, something that needed to be examined, indeed, by the head doctor.

Socrates may have been clever enough to feel that he was an ethical wreck. His suicidal submission may have been an attempt to redeem himself, or whatever was left of his honor (which he also tried to regain with his insolence to the jury).

Plato would pursue the fight for fascism (“kingship”). Aristotle, by teaching, mentoring, educating, befriending, advising a number of extremely close, family-like friends, the abominable Alexander, Craterus and Antipater, finally fulfilled Socrates’ wet dream: Athenian Direct Democracy was destroyed and replaced by an official plutocracy overlorded by Antipater (supremo dictator, and executor of Aristotle’s will, in more ways than one).

This trio of philosophical malefactors became the heroes 22 centuries of dictatorship (“monarchy”) needed as a justification. A justification where “civic duty” was defined as blind obedience to the “Laws” (whatever they were, even unjust “Laws”). This amplified Socrates’ hatred of Direct Democracy. So the works of the trio were preciously preserved, and elevated to the rank of the admirable.

It is rather a basket of deplorables. We owe them the destruction of Direct Democracy for 23 centuries, and counting.

And what Of Socrates’ regret for being so deplorable? (Which I alleged he had to experience.) A dying Socrates lying on a couch, uncovered his face and uttered— “Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Asklepios; will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?”  Asklepios cured disease, and provided with rebirth, symbolized by the singing of the rooster calling the new day. This has been traditionally interpreted (by Nietzsche) as meaning that (Socrates’?) death was a cure for (his?) life. Nietzsche accused Socrates to be culprit of the subsequent degeneracy of civilization (and I do agree with that thesis). Certainly, Socrates, a self-described “gadfly” was deprived of gravitas.

Wisdom needs to dance, but cannot be altogether deprived of gravitas, as it is, after all, the gravest thing.. Maybe Socrates felt this confusedly, besides having regrets for his status of thinking insect. Socrates could have easily escaped, and Crito had an evasion ready. By killing himself Socrates behaved like a serious Japanese Lord opening his belly to show his insides were clean, and its intent good. Well, many a scoundrel has committed seppuku, and hemlock is nothing like cutting the belly.

Human beings are endowed with the instinct of regret, because we are the thinking species. It is crucial that we find the truth, and when we have lived a lie, indulged in error, the best of use are haunted by the past, and revisit it to find what the truth really was. Regrets has many stages, like cancer. The most correct philosophical form of regret is to re-established the truth. The cheap way out is to flee from reality, as Socrates did.

How to explain Socrates’ insolence to the jury? There again, it was a desperate attempt at reaching the sensation of self-righteousness and trying to impart it to the jury (this is often seen  on the Internet, with the glib one-liners and vacuous logic which pass for depth nowadays).

The inexperienced democracy in Athens did not always behave well. Athens behaved terribly with Melos (see link above). But the case of Socrates is different. Ultimately, the train of thoughts and moods promoted by Socrates weakened those who wanted to defend the free republics of Greece against the fascist, exterminationist Macedonian plutocracy. Demosthenes and Athenian Direct Democracy was mortally poisoned by Socrates.

Thus, Socrates execution was not just tit for tat. It was not enough of tit for tat. It was a preventive measure, in defense of Direct Democracy, which failed, because it was too meek.

Democracy does not mean to turn the other cheek, to have the golden beast eat that one too. In ultimate circumstances, democracy has an ultimate weapon too, and that is fascism. This is why the Roman, French and American republics prominently brandish the fasces. Fascism is the ultimate war weapon. But fascism is not the ultimate society. Far from it: political fascism, just a few individuals leading entails intellectual fascism, namely just a few moods and ideas leading. Before one knows it, one is in plutocracy, where not only wealth rules, but so does the cortege of the worst ideas and moods which characterize it.

Socrates often talk the talk, contradicting completely the way he lived (for example he said one should never return an injury, but, as a hoplite, he killed at least four men in combat!)

Socrates spoke so well sometimes, that he can stay a symbol of truth persecuted. But, because it is a lie, replacing him by Hypatia, Boetius, Bruno and, or Cavaillès, and, or, others, is urgent. Indeed, the reality is that Socrates was not just inimical to democracy. The current of thought he floated by was inimical to science, mental progress, and the truth he claimed to be pining for.  And even him may have been so overwhelmed by these astounding contradictions, that, in the end, assisted suicide for his pathetic mental writhing was, indeed, the optimal outcome.

Patrice Ayme’

 

PM Trudeau’ s Satanic Philosophy

Tolerance For Those Who Violate Humanity Is The Lowest Of the Low:

Homo is the philosophical animal. Philosophy is about choice. Philosophy is the set of hard choices of the most optimal ideas, emotions. Unfortunately, in our so-called representative democracy, a few minds infused by greed and self-important delusion, elected politicians, posture as gutter philosophers (gutterosophers?) Thanks to their command of giant propaganda and means at their disposal, they inflict on us their primary school minds (as all their minds can do is getting elected, they are otherwise little developed!)

Homo Sapiens can be translated as the Latin-Greek hybrid, Homo Sophis (Wise Homo). Yet loving wisdom does not mean one finds it always, nor what the highest wisdom is. Values which are wise in some ways, may come in conflict with each other (as we will see in the present essay). Wisdom is always evolving, adapting, as circumstances and one’s knowledge base change (their lack of adaptation is a good reason to be against “revealed” superstitious religions…)

Intelligence is the ability to discern subtle nuances which entail massive differences. Example: occurrences of obvious electrical activity in nature are extremely subtle. For the Ancient Greeks, there was only the mystery of static electricity, rubbing some types of fur (that lightning was about the same writ large would have been more philosophy than physics). However, in our present world, electricity is everywhere, thanks to the application of subtle logic and delicate observations.

What’s Wrong With His Head?

We will analyze an example here of how subtlety  : the Prime Minister of Canada obliterates the struggle against sexism under the guise of respect for diversity. This is a violation of the genus Homo. Life is diversity. Homo does not respect all and any life. Some life, Homo obliterated, some it obliterate, some it plans to obliterate (various diseases, for example).

Advancing wisdom is a necessity, for the species to survive: as human domination changes the world, human adaptation to the world has to change.

Politicians are important only when, as Solon and Pericles, they implement new wisdom, more advanced than previous wisdom. New, correct philosophy moves history. Those, who, like the despicable PM of Canada, Trudeau, on the ground of “multiculturalism” meet in gender segregated societies, deserve not just our contempt, but our loud reprobation. He evokes “the sisters up there” [sic]. Look at: https://twitter.com/LaloDagach/status/776548267479994368

Make no mistake: i would like to like Trudeau 100%, and I have spoken highly of him in the past (because Trudeau knows enough about the Quantum puzzle to sound intelligent on the subject). However Trudeau preaches to tolerate the intolerable, and that is intolerable.

However, on the most important subject, multiculturalism versus civilization, PM Trudeau brays like a common donkey.

So-called “multiculturalism” is cultural apartheid instituted as a new morality. Thus it is a particularly deep form of racism. Somalia’s famous Ayaan Hirsi Ali is in full agreement with me:“Multiculturalism is moral racism, disguised as broad-mindedness.”

Trudeau: “In casual conversation, I’d even use the word barbaric to describe female circumcision, for example, but in an official Government of Canada publication, there needs to be a little bit of an attempt at responsible neutrality.” You are the irresponsible one, Trudeau! This statement, per se, makes you an enemy of humanity, let alone civilization, and disqualifies you for sitting on a throne and pontificating. Here we go for 9/11 and the Boston bombing:

It Is Our Fault That There Is A Barbaric, Savage, Ideology At War With Civilization For 13 Centuries. Yeah, Right. Should We Excuse Ourselves For Nazism Too?

I am no idiot and was not born yesterday either. Why does the Prime Minister of Canada advocate “multiculturalism” and “diversity” right or wrong, sexist or not? It is important to understand this fully. Trudeau is not an idiot either, far from it, although it looks as if he were born yesterday.

Opposing opinion and finding it wrong in a way that even those who hold it have to admit it is wrong is never enough. One has also to determine if the erroneous opinion was a sincere mistake, or whether it was itself caused by a higher, hidden reason.  

In the case of Canada, the situation is clear. Canada is even larger than the USA, and yet has a smaller population than California. And a much smaller GDP. So it is a strategic decision to swell the Canadian population, come hell and high water. Canada has long opted for the strategy Merkel tried to adopt (and which is rejected by the German electorate).

Several Muslim attacks happened yesterday in the USA (remember; the Qur’an orders to commit such attacks against categories of people which cover more than 90% of the population of the West). Right the attacks (mostly) failed, but that was happenstance: one bomb did not go off, another went off in a huge, immensely strong steel garbage container, and the pipe bomb in New Jersey exploded in a void, because the US Marines race had been delayed.  Finally the attacker in Minnesota, screaming “God Is Great!”, and asking victims if they were Muslims was shot by an off-duty police officer (the Islamist State claimed the attack was conducted by one of its “soldiers”). 

Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada advocates hypocritical racism disguised as worldly tolerance:”diversity is a source of strength, not a source of weakness”, he bleats. Yes. except when “diversity” embraces Nazis and, or Salafists (is there a difference?) Trudeau does not realize that fighting sexism is also a core issue of civilization. Embracing a part of Islam which is antagonistic to both civilization and human nature, as he does, makes him an enemy of civilization. One cannot benignly tolerate this sort of maniacal intolerance.

Now, all right, one can go to some Trump rallies, and, I am sure one can come across intolerables who are really intolerable (as Hillary Clinton said). However racist supporters of Trump are not in power. Trudeau is. So Trudeau’s racist utterances, and sexist policies, should be absolutely condemned.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. But what is wisdom? The set of relationships between ideas and moods which work, including how to establish such relationships. Islamist ideology works in some ways: it allows to win wars for a peculiar elite (in the desert). But it does not work in most other ways. Real wisdom works in a universal way.

Why are so many Muslims attracted by the Literal Islam of the Qur’an? Precisely because of the pro-Islamist propaganda of the Main Stream media and our oil-dependent leaders. By making “Islamophobia”, the fear of Islam, a symptom of racism (whereas the fear of Catholicism, catholicophobia, is not racist…), a victimology was offered: claim you are a victim of that racism, and the authorities will come to your help, be it by lip service alone. Sure enough, the parents of the Afghan naturalized US citizen in New York and New Jersey claimed to be victim of that “racism”. They own a restaurant. Their son planted seven bombs over the weekend. Two exploded (injuring 29 people and one robot). Ultimately, it is those who planted the notion that to fear an anti-humanist ideology is racism, who are to blame. And what was these sycophants’ ultimate motivation? Pleasing the powers that be, who got the oil, thanks to those who rule, thanks to Islam. A lot of thanks to go around, in those hall of power and academe.

This system of thought and moods is a powerful generator of extremism. A recent study in France showed that 46% of French “Muslims” are totally secularized (good!) However, and that’s horrifying, 28% of “Muslims” are “ultras”, in other words, Salafists. This is mostly attributable to the Islamophilia of leading politics.

Tolerance for racist and sexist actions is a form of tolerance for the most satanic instinct, that of destroying the many in the name of the few. Va de retro, Satanas.

Patrice Ayme’

No Philosophy, No Progress, No Civilization

Progress is necessary: all ecologies, and thus technologies, get exhausted, or exhausting. Civilization rides a bicycle, and cannot long stop anywhere.

Progress does not happen out of the blue. It is instigated by the love of wisdom (philosophy). The progress of humanity is propelled by exerting a mind, one mind, at the highest level, first, and find a new idea, or emotion. And then to make that new wisdom blossom, and propagate throughout society. How exactly this happened can help figure out how it may happen again.

The explosion of philosophy in Ancient Greece was not sparked by Socrates (contrarily to legend). The reason for the veneration of the trio constituted by Socrates, his student Plato, and  Aristotle, student of the latter, is rather sinister. Socrates launched a weasel denunciation of Direct Democracy. demolishing it because of technicalities. That turned into the Politically Correct justification of more than 20 centuries of fascism (“monarchies”) from Eire to India.

Thus Socrates was a sort of famous counter-revolutionary. He helped demolish what he profited from, Athenian civilization (Aristotle did much worse, he demolished democratic civilization itself, promoting instead a fascist plutocracy led by his most intimate friends). The ascent of wisdom and progress was fully evident by the age of Pericles, decades before. Pericles’ top advisers, including his wife, were top philosophers. They promoted the concept of “Open Society“ (lauded in Pericles’ Funeral Oration). Arguably, the concept of Open Society, and the progress of mind it brought, was important than the entire work of Socrates.

But to understand the rise of wisdom in Greece, one has to go much earlier than Pericles’ generation. The great legislator Solon, a bit more than a century before Pericles, replaced the draconian Draco style of legislation with the opposite orientation. 

On The Left, Representation Of Solon In The US House Of Representatives. On the right, a statue of Solon.

Solon was born around 638 BCE. He was also a poet and war leader (he secured to Athens the possession of the island of Salamis through battle and Sparta’s arbitrage). Solon replaced systematic execution for any crime, by subtle and appropriate laws. More controversially, he erased debts (the ones in the know, his friends, profited from it).

Solon launched Athens into that Open Society managed around ideas and progress. Solon was a great traveller, and left Athens for more than a decade. Even earlier, Homer played an important role, with his tales of how the deepest emotions mess up with the world, or lift it beyond heavens. 

So why was Greece so wise? Because that’s how it rose to prominence. 

Similarly, the renewed rise of wisdom in the European Middle Ages did not happen just in the famed “renaissance” around 1450 CE. It had started much earlier. A full millennium earlier, when the Franks founded their civilization on tolerance. By 650 CE, the Merovingian Franks, by then the great power of Europe, thanks to their control of Gallia and Germania, outlawed slavery (under Bathilde, the slave who became queen). That was followed by nationalization of the Catholic church, fighting off three massive Islamist invasions, mandatory education, total religious tolerance, and a “renovation of the Roman empire”. By then all religious establishment had to teach everybody secularly, founding the university system. 

The Economist wrote a critique of “The Dream of Enlightenment” (by Anthony Gottlieb) “on some of the great Enlightenment thinkers, including Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Hume, Rousseau and Voltaire…

They were freelance philosophers working independently of the universities, criticising mainstream views and liberating thought from its academic straitjacket and neo-Aristotelian dogmatism. They were dangerous thinkers all, one publication away from exile, imprisonment or worse for their radical views on religion, politics and morality. Spinoza was the subject of a cherem, the equivalent of excommunication from the Amsterdam Sephardic synagogue; Locke disguised his authorship… spent a number of years in self-imposed exile; Hume chose to publish his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” posthumously; and Rousseau fled to England when persecuted in mainland Europe”. 

One cannot underestimate the terror generating new thinking brings. Most of the top thinkers where on the run, or in terrible trouble, fleeing here and there, from Giordano Bruno to Kepler, Galileo,  to Descartes, Hobbes, etc. In “What is Enlightenment?” (1784), Immanuel Kant used the motto Sapere aude (“Dare to know”) 

This all started five centuries earlier. By 1100 CE, the great philosopher, lover and songwriter Abelard was called “our Aristotle” by Peter the Venerable, head of Cluny (the largest religious establishment). Abelard fought Saint Bernard. Cathars and later Vaudois appeared in short order. Abelard got excommunicated, then readmitted to the Church (?), etc. 

It was even worse under Islam. A bit after the war between Abelard and Saint Bernard, the famous Ibn Rushd (“Averroes” in Western historiography), an Islamist judge, philosopher and doctor to Caliph (of Spain) was banned, and his books destroyed for writing “The Incoherence of the Incoherence” against a religious fanatic who had attacked philosophy in The Incoherence of the Philosophers  (Ibn Rushd got rehabilitated, shortly before his death, after a great victory of Caliph Al Mansour). 

In the next five centuries, many thinkers would be legally executed. Executed for offenses such as printing books; the Sultan Francois Premier of France (soon imitated by the Sultan of Turkey) outlawed printing for a while, under the penalty of death, some of Rabelais’s friends and printers were burned alive; Rabelais himself, a well-connected top doctor, was not touched, but implicitly threatened. This courage is what the Enlightenment was built on.

Bringing people together on yesterday’s consensus is easy. Politicians love to do that. Philosophers, the real ones, do the opposite: they bring people asunder, down to the bottom of their souls, to establish tomorrow’s consensus, with superior, yet unborn ideas. The greatest leaders were definitively either advised by philosophers (for example, Charlemagne, and the US Founding Fathers) or philosophers themselves (Cicero, Caesar, Clovis, Solon, Pericles, Queen Bathilde, etc.)

We are the thinking species. Yet thinking means creation, anew. And creation means destruction, at least neurologically speaking. Loving is giving, yet the gift of really truly new thinking, is a gift of destruction. This is definitively a paradox, common people have a hard time embracing the concept and the mood behind it, as they rather embrace the mood that being a sheep in the flock is much safer.

No wonder humanity is ambivalent about real philosophers, except when they are safely dead already. 

Patrice Ayme’

Relativity, Absolute Frame, Simultaneity, Action At A Distance

Quantum Physics comes with an instantaneous action at a distance. A simultaneity. I call it the QI, the Quantum Interaction.

This simultaneity, this action at a distance, has baffled Relativity enthusiasts. See “Taming The Quantum Spooks”. 

https://aeon.co/essays/can-retrocausality-solve-the-puzzle-of-action-at-a-distance

According to Einsteinian lore, one cannot have such an “instantaneous” interaction, it would contradict “Relativity”. (From my point the interaction is not instantaneous, just more than 10^10 c, that is 10^10 the speed of light, at least.)

Jules Henri Poincaré asserted the Principle of Relativity (1904) and demonstrated that, supposing that the speed of light was always constant, one could get all the equations of Special Relativity. Then Einstein, opportunistically jumping on the immensely famous Poincaré’s work, asserted that the Frenchman’s work showed that the speed of light was constant (whereas a more cautious  Poincaré asserted earlier that, considering that the speed of light was always found experimentally to be constant, one should view that as a law of physics). Of course, Einstein did not quote the French, as he was a good Swabian (and not a good European), keen to ride, as his mentor Planck was, Prussian fascism.

This Field Of Galaxies Defines An Absolute Frame. It Is Plain To See, Only Years Of Learning Academic Physics Can Brainwash Someone, Not To See It.

Poincaré knew very well Lorentz’s Local Time theory, which he had helped established, in the preceding quarter of a century. However, Jules Henri still believed in Absolute Time (Einstein did not).

Why to believe in Absolute Time? Poincaré did not wax lyrical on the subject. He actually said nothing (contrarily to Nobel laureate Bergson twenty years later, who violently contradicted Einstein). Nor did any physicist, in the meantime (110 years), dare defend Absolute Time (we have lived in an Einstein terror regime!) But this what Quantum Physics quietly does and what I will now dare to do (if I can contradict professional Salafists, I surely can dare to contradict professional physicists).

Suppose we have an absolute reference frame. Bring a light clock there, at rest, call that time: Absolute time. One can slow transport clocks (say using chemical rockets, and taking 100,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri) all over the universe, establishing UNIVERSAL TIME. Relativistic effects depend upon vv/cc. The square of speed, divided by the square of the speed of light c. If v/c is small, vv/cc is even much smaller, and negligible. (Poincaré showed this first.)

So is there an absolute reference frame? Sure. That frame is the one steady relative to distance pulsars, quasars, distant galaxies, etc. (no rotation) and steady relative to the Cosmological Background Radiation. Then one can talk about simultaneity, absolute time, and thus instantaneous interaction at a distance.

(This is one approach; there is another approach of mine, more mathematical, using the fact a manifold of dimension n can be embedded in one of dimension 2n +1 (Whitney). Or then one can use the celebrated Nash’ embedding theorem.)

There is no contradiction of Absolute Time theory, or should we say, possibility, with Local Time Theory (LTT). LTT is about light clocks. Relativity is about light clocks. Yet we know of other interactions… plus the QUANTUM INTERACTION.

BTW, in “General Relativity”, “Einstein’s theory of gravitation”, the speed of light is not constant. Even Einstein recognized this.

Conclusion? One can profitably consider Ian Miller’s “Dark Energy and Modern Science“. Even physicists can believe what they believe in, on the most important fundamentals, because it is fashionable, a rite one has to believe in, so that one can become an initiated member of the tribe. And the more absurd the belief, the better.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Essence Of MORALITY: SUSTAINABILITY, Not Just Avoiding Suffering.

What is morality? The answer is not in “religions” established in the last few centuries, by self-obsessed elites, such as Islam. Verily, there is just one religion, the religion of man: Ecce Homo.

Past religions could not be sure that man was a religion, so they invented god(s). The idea is that, to distinguish right from wrong, one needs absolute truth, and that absolute truth was called god(s).

However, we now know for sure that there is an absolute, an absolute creator, and an absolute morality, from that long (quantum) computation called evolution.

Right And Wrong Draws Another Line, Across Knowledge Bases. That the All Too Christian Solzhenitsyn Naturally Forgets

Heart Without Knowledge Is Only Ruin Of Morality

The fact that we, ourselves, are an absolute, is why hysterical “animal rights” advocates have not much standing: animals are not equivalent to us. They are no absolute. That is why Gary Francione, a professor of law at Rutgers and East Anglia Universities is fundamentally wrong.  

https://aeon.co/essays/why-keeping-a-pet-is-fundamentally-unethical

Says he: “A morally just world would have no pets, no aquaria, no zoos. No fields of sheep, no barns of cows. That’s true animal rights.” No poetry, no heart for other species, no alter sentiencism, either. That’s the perfect recipe for the total disappearance of the entire animal kingdom. Animals can survive only if us, masters of the Earth, and soon the Sol-Centaurus system, are interested by them.

True stupidity gives me counterexamples from which reason can bounce. Francione knows nothing. More than once in the mountains I met a solitary sheep, grazing. What did the sheep do? It had a good look at me, and then came to me, so I could rescue it from its predicament. Was the sheep suffering? No. Was the sheep feeling friendly? Yes. Is that a crime? No.

Law professor Francione confuses “what hurts a sentient being” with “immoral“. Pushing his logic further would mean all life of ALL sentient beings should be stopped, as life means hurt, for a sentient being, at one point, or another. (This is my old objection to Fundamentalist Buddhism; at least Buddhism, following Hinduism, is logical, and calls for Nirvana, the extinction of all cycles of life. The extinct Celtic religion was just the same.)

Thus, pushed a bit further, we should not have children: surely they cry as they are born, and that’s just the beginning. Hence we should let humanity disappear.

Leaving animals free to hurt each other.

This is a problem: if we are around, we may hurt animals, if we are not around, animals will eat each others.

Thus the author writes of ethics, while not knowing that the fundamental sense of “moral” is not “avoiding hurt”, but avoiding the behaviors which are unsustainable for our species.

Morality is species dependent. In some species, the newborns eat each other.  Newborn eating is moral in those species.

Thus, there is even worse. The real nature of the group of species known as hominids is that these were carnivorous bipedal apes who rose to dominance, precisely because animal protein and fat is so nourishing. It is moral for hominids to eat flesh, and especially so for the highly carnivorous Homo Erectus and Sapiens.

Many are the species which eat animals, few are those who do not. All primates, even cute, innocent looking Lemurians and Golden Tamarins, grab animals and eat them, whenever they can. Even grazing animals eat meat. The meat of snails, insects, and whatever crawls in the grass end in the stomachs of innocent looking grazers. This is why PM Thatcher made the cows cannibalistic, and, to save money, did not “render” the meat very long, thus causing “mad cow disease”.

In a just punishment, Thatcher herself became a mad cow, and croaked from it.

Meat made humanity, by enabling big brains and their extravagant energy consumption. Indeed, the meat habit came first. By millions of years. Those, like professor Francione, who cry each time we eat an animal raw (it happens when I run), want to deprive us of the very essence of our humanity. Being bipedal made our ancestors in the most efficient savannah dwellers: man is the animal with the fastest, furthest ground transportation capability, especially when it’s noon, and very hot. This (apparently weird and useless) characteristic is explained by an asset: the ability to catch up with any potential prey, especially when it’s very hot in the tropics, and Homo can see very well by mid-day.

Not just this.  Our hominid ancestors accelerated their evolution, by carrying weapons in their arms. Forgetting this and pushing a morality which even sheep would find better for what they eat (grass) will leave those who adopt it, and those that they pretend to defend, defenseless. One may as well advocate pacifism when facing deliberate evil. This sort of nonsense is what enabled the Twentieth Century’s greatest horrors, such as Nazism. And, indeed, the Nazis were fanatically for animal rights. Why? Because pushed to the extreme, animal rights contradict human rights. Thus, promoting the former exaggeratedly, enables  to violate the latter.

Patrice Ayme

The 9/11 Conspiracies

9/11: SEVERAL IMBRICATED CONSPIRACIES:

Propagandists of the established order say:”Conspiracy theorists are mad”. They know, or hope, that most people know no history: most of history is the fruit of conspiracies.

As Pharaoh Ramses III wrote in stone in 1175 BCE: “The foreign countries (i.e. Sea Peoples) made a CONSPIRACY in their islands… No land could stand before their arms…” Islands such as Sardinia, Sicily, etc. had conspired to attack the rich G8 of the Bronze Age civilization of the Eastern Mediterranean. Result of this conspiracy? Civilization collapsed so badly over a century, that even writing itself was lost.

For decades, I met smart behinds who told me only crazies thought conspiracies were interesting. Then there was 9/11. Even the smartest cretins had to admit, from the bottom of their obscure minds, that it was a conspiracy. Clearly, a conspiracy of Al Qaeda. But not just a conspiracy of Al Qaeda: president Carter, Reagan, Clinton and Bush conspired with Muslim terrorists, and president Obama has sung the praises of their ideology, Islam (also known as “Salafism”). One knows a conspiracy best, when the emperor has no clothes. Here is the American leadership, naked in the White House, for all to see, and few to understand:

Reagan Meets With Muslim Terrorists at the White House. That Conspiracy Led To 9/11

[Smart idiots will say:’Oh, because you think these people flew the planes in the World Trade Center?‘ It’s hard to answer idiots. Try with a chipmunk. Idiocy is easy, intelligence, difficult.]

If one conspiracy, why not more? It was astounding that, three years after the world soccer cup in Paris, the USA was completely undefended. Was that deliberate? A conspiracy of inaction, maybe? Acting up, by not defending oneself against an obvious threat? Was Bush and his friend Clinton subconsciously looking for reasons to invade and destroy Iraq, maybe? Just speculating.

A country such as France has air patrol ready to take off with fast (2,530 km/h) supersonic interceptors. The interception time, anywhere, anytime is 5 minutes, at most. Israel, of course, has even shorter interception times. In 1998, during the world cup, the French Air Force flew CAP (COMBAT AIR PATROL) above the Stade de France. (After centuries of fighting Muslim terrorists, that was only natural.)

There was plenty of time to intercept the planes of 9/11, had interceptors been ready anywhere in the north-east USA (a civilian in civilian clothing took off after the jets in an unarmed military F15, in one of the weird events. An unarmed interceptor could have crashed in a civilian jet: the Nazis used that method in April 1945 against US bombers… However that guy did not catch up.).

The surface area of France is comparable to the north-east heartland of the USA. For Christmas 1994, six Jihadists tried to crash a jumbo jet hijacked in Algeria, on Paris. They were all killed, and the passengers all rescued. Starting on September 14, 2001, CAP has been flown over the USA and Canada. There was no CAP before that. 

Many believe that 9/11 was actually a conspiracy of the US government. In a sense, we already see there was: not having any air defense over the USA was more than weird.

The detailed reasonings of those who think the US government dynamited the towers are silly, counterfactual, erroneous. But a friend of mine, whom I knew for decades, is not just a mountain climber (thus calm), but also a top notch, white, US born engineer in charge of checking nuclear plants and dangerous gas pipelines in earthquake country. He is also not political.

My friend does believe that there are reasons to believe that 9/11 was a US government conspiracy. He is a top notch engineer, so he cannot be easily written off, as a basket case from “the basket of deplorables” (to quote Hillary Clinton). Various subtle indices look very suspicious to him. So what’s up? Hence we see that those who believe that the US government set up 9/11 can be very serious, and much more versed in matters logical and technological than, say, president Obama.

How come? The answer is obvious: they are right, in some sense. They correctly perceive that the US government’s modus operandi is to set-up conspiracies within conspiracies. (And little do they know: much of Twentieth Century history was a conspiracy, still undetected, and quaint technologies such as “Quantitative Easing”, are themselves conspiracies. All they have in common is they profit always the same class.)

***

The US Government’s Actions, In the Most Important Sense, Set Up 9/11:

Did agents of the US deep state plant explosives in the World Trade Center? Obviously not: the poorly conceived buildings, basically large steel tents, collapsed on their own. In 1945, a bomber lost in the fog, hit the Empire State Building. The skyscraper caught fire so badly and thoroughly that the elevators’ cables melted.

Yet the Empire State is well-built, with concrete and a honeycomb structure. Contrarily to the World Trade Center, the Empire State did not see its structure melt. A cab stuffed with rescuers and wounded crashed to the ground from the top, after its cable melted… The elevator emergency braking worked, and all, although wounded some more, survived.

Osama Bin Laden was a peaceful scion of plutocrats, managing family business in Turkey, when he was contacted by the CIA and SIA (Saudi Intelligence Agency). OBL was then made into the second main agent of US imperialism in Afghanistan (the first one being Pakistan’s Intelligence Agency). Pakistani intelligence advocated striking soft targets, such as schools. Pakistan acted under American orders, all along. The idea was to make Afghanistan dysfunctional, if not an American province.

As usual, the leaders and owners of the USA wanted absolutely that the French (!) or Russian commercial and diplomatic empires be made as small as possible.  

The American Deep State & Secret Agencies Plotted With Islamists To Frustrate French & Russian Secular Interests In Afghanistan

Front row, from left: Major Gen. Hamid Gul, director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Willian Webster; Deputy Director for Operations Clair George; an ISI colonel; and senior CIA official, Milt Bearden at a Mujahideen training camp in North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan in 1987. (source RAWA)

My father was involved in geological missions which revealed that Afghanistan’s soil was rich in minerals. After that, all hell broke loose, as Pakistan attacked Afghanistan covertly (obviously under US orders). As that was not enough, president Jimmy Carter outright ordered direct all-out secret war against Afghanistan, on July 3, 1979. To learn it from the horse’s mouth, one can consult:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/usa-attack-against-afghanistan/

(That interview of Carter’s National Security Adviser was censored in the USA, as it appeared only in the French version of that magazine! Censorship helps conspiracies, this is why the New York Times blocks all my comments, even if innocuous, and three words long.)

The idea of Carter was the same as it would be with Bush and Iraq: one way to make the USA stronger, is to make other countries weaker.

French intelligence people have asserted that Osama Bin Laden met with US intelligence officials, even when the USA was already in open conflict with Al Qaeda.

Speaking of conspiracies, is Barack Obama the founder of the Islamist State? As Trump asserted? In a sense, yes. It was under Obama’s watch, he was the main actor (as Trump said). Obama and Clinton took active measures to insure that Syria would be in the mess it presently is.

In particular, the deliberate destruction of Iraq by the USA, exactly what US oilmen and frackers wanted, could only bring forward a desperate resistance of deplorables such as the Islamist State fighters.

Sad is the state of US politics, when it is a greedy, self-inflating tycoon who has to tell the fundamental truth, because American intellectuals did not dare to, or, worse, were incapable of even having these thoughts.

Did higher-ups in Saudi Arabia finance the 9/11 attacks? Probably. Bin Laden was then cut-off, officially, from its wealthy family. So where did the considerable money for organizing 9/11 come from (the plot was larger than just the four planes which killed 2,996 people). It is also clear that much larger amounts of Arabian money fostered all sorts of terrorism and ‘radicalization”, worldwide since the 1930s. Now, of course, “Arabian” money does not really exist. Ultimately that was all about dollars circulating, and recycled on Wall Street (yes, Dollars, not Euros: Saddam Hussein lost his life for forgetting the difference)

So it is excellent that Congress voted unanimously to let families sue the State of Saudi Arabia. If we want to outlaw Salafism, as I proposed (and now Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, a French presidential candidate, supports the idea… so I support her), we have to outlaw Saudi Arabia under its present ideology and legal system.

Today, the resolutely clueless Obama, hell-bound, as usual, to make us all stupid, started his 9/11 tribute by quoting the god in the name of whom the planes were crashed in the towers.  THE PRESIDENT: “Good morning. Scripture tells us, “Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you…write them on the tablet of your heart.”

Well, this is a circus. The 9/11 hijackers killed in the name of the exact same scripture, which Obama quotes from approvingly, about the exact same god. And Muslim are going to celebrate the willingness of Abraham to kill his son, just because the same God told him to. The Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an all say, in all too many places, to kill unbelievers, miscreants, homosexuals, and this or that category of people.

By quoting “Scripture” as it were the ultimate ideology, the highest morality, Obama is winking at the terrorists who killed thousands of innocents on 9/11. Surely he is chuckling inside (as he orders drone strikes on civilian gatherings, just because he can).

By using Fundamentalist Islam as a weapon, starting in the 1930s, the USA used an unpredictable dragon to foster its oil agenda. Soon enough, the God of “Scripture” became the official god of the USA, inscribed by Congress in 1954:”In God We Trust”, replacing the old secular motto.

That was the least problem. The bigger problem, is that fostering of the desert God, and his will to human sacrifice made the West irrational.

But then, of course, that is the ultimate conspiracy. The only way great masters can exploit multitude of small people, is by making them so irrational that they lose track of their self-interest and of what is human, and what is not human. That was Reagan’s job, that was Clinton’s job, that was Bush’s job, and it has been Obama’s greatest success. Just because of Obama’s lofty rhetoric, and the color of his skin, nobody seems to have observed what he was really doing.

Fostering plutocracy further. But his employers will be grateful next year. That Nobel Prize on day one was just a foretaste of riches to come. Absolute power rots minds absolutely.

The 9/11 hijackers killed in the name of the exact same scripture, which Obama quotes from so approvingly today. Clueless, or devilish? Satanic, of course: we don’t call it plutocracy, the rule of Pluto, also known later as ‘Satan’, for no good reason. By quoting “scripture”, Obama exonerates “scripture”, just where scripture killed 2,996 people (yes, I included the hijackers). Because exonerating “scripture” from the act those who believe in it accomplished in its name, does not just binds us to “scripture” some more. It also means that we learn to ignore the main reason why those suicidal attacks happened. In other words, president Obama is teaching us to accept to be stupid.

Making those it subjugates stupid is an elite most self-preserving strategy.

Patrice Ayme

DARK MATTER, Or How Inquiry Proceeds

How to find really new knowledge? How do you find really new science? Not by knowing the result: this is what we don’t have yet. Any really new science will not be deduced from pre-existing science. Any really new knowledge will come out of the blue. Poetical logic will help before linear logic does.

The case of Dark Matter is telling: this increasingly irritating elephant in the bathroom has been in evidence for 80 years, lumbering about. As the encumbering beast did not fit existing science, it was long religiously ignored by the faithful, as a subject not worthy of serious inquiry by very serious physicists. Now Dark Matter, five times more massive than Standard Model matter, is clearly sitting heavily outside of the Standard Model, threatening to crush it into irrelevance. Dark matter obscures the lofty pretense of known physics to explain everything (remember the grandly named TOE, the so-called “Theory Of Everything“? That was a fraud, snake oil, because main stream physics celebrities crowed about TOE, while knowing perfectly well that Dark Matter dwarfed standard matter, and was completely outside of the Standard Model).

Physicists are presently looking for Dark Matter, knowing what they know, namely that nature has offered them a vast zoo of particles, many of them without rhyme or reason (some have rhyme, a symmetry, a mathematical group such as SU3 acting upon them; symmetries revealed new particles, sometimes). 

Bullet Cluster, 100 Million Years Old. Two Galaxies Colliding. The Dark Matter, In Blue, Is Physically Separated From the Hot, Standard Matter Gas, in Red.

[This sort of pictures is most of what we presently have to guess what Dark Matter could be; the physical separation of DM and SM is most telling to me: it seems to indicate that SM and DM do not respond to the same forces, something that my Quantum theory predicts; it’s known that Dark Matter causes gravitational lensing, as one would expect, as it was first found by its gravitational effects, in the 1930s…]

However, remember: a truly completely new piece of science cannot be deduced from pre-existing paradigm. Thus, if Dark Matter was really about finding a new particle type, it would be interesting, but not as interesting as it would be, if it were not, after all, a new particle type, but from a completely new law in physics.

This is the quandary about finding truly completely new science. It can never be deduced from ruling paradigms, and may actually overthrow them. What should then be the method to use? Can Descartes and Sherlock Holmes help? The paradigm presented by Quantum Physics helps. The Quantum looks everywhere in space to find solutions: this is where its (“weird”) nonlocality comes in. Nonlocality is crucial for interference patterns and for finding lowest energy solutions, as in the chlorophyll molecule. This suggests that our minds should go nonlocal too, and we should look outside of a more extensive particle zoo to find what Dark Matter is.

In general, searching for new science should be by looking everywhere, not hesitating to possibly contradict what is more traditional than well established.

An obvious possibility is, precisely, that Quantum Physics is itself incomplete, and generating Dark Matter in places where said incompleteness would be most blatant. More precisely, Quantum processes, stretched over cosmic distances, instead of being perfectly efficient and nonlocal over gigantically cosmic locales, could leave a Quantum mass-energy residue, precisely in the places where extravagant cosmic stretching of Quanta occurs (before “collapse”, aka “decoherence”).

The more one does find a conventional explanation (namely a new type of particle) for Dark Matter, the more likely my style of explanation is likely. How could one demonstrate it? Not by looking for new particles, but by conducting new and more refined experiments in the foundations of Quantum Physics.

If this guess is correct, whatever is found askew in the axioms of present Quantum Physics could actually help future Quantum Computer technology (because the latter works with Quantum foundations directly, whereas conventional high energy physics tend to eschew the wave aspects, due to the high frequencies involved).

Going on a tangent is what happens when the central, attractive force, is let go. A direct effect of freedom. Free thinking is tangential. We have to learn to produce tangential thinking.

René Descartes tried to doubt the truth of all his beliefs to determine which beliefs he could be certain were true. However, at the end of “The Meditations” he hastily conclude that we can distinguish between dream and reality. It is not that simple. The logic found in dreams is all too similar to the logic used by full-grown individuals in society.

Proof? Back to Quantum Physics. On the face of it, the axioms of Quantum Physics have a dream like quality (there is no “here”, nor “there”, “now” is everywhere, and, mysteriously, the experiment is Quantum, whereas the “apparatus” is “classical”). Still, most physicists, after insinuating they have figured out the universe, eschew the subject carefully.  The specialists of Foundations are thoroughly confused: see Sean Carroll, http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/01/17/the-most-embarrassing-graph-in-modern-physics/

However unbelievable Quantum Physics, however dream-like it is, physicists believe in it, and don’t question it anymore than cardinals would Jesus. Actually, it’s this dream-like nature which, shared by all, defines the community of physicists. Cartesian doubt, pushed further than Descartes did, will question not just the facts, the allegations, but the logic itself. And even the mood behind it.

Certainly, in the case of Dark Matter, some of the questions civilization has to ask should be:

1. How sure are we of the Foundations of Quantum Physics? (Answer: very sure, all too sure!)
2. Could not it be that Dark Matter is a cosmic size experiment in the Foundations of Quantum Physics?

Physics, properly done, does not just question the nature of nature. Physics, properly done, questions the nature of how we find out the nature of anything. Physics, properly done, even questions the nature of why we feel the way we do. And the way we did. About anything, even poetry. In the end, indeed, even the toughest logic is a form of poetry, hanging out there, justified by its own beauty, and nothing else. Don’t underestimate moods: they call what beauty is.

Patrice Ayme’

Space X: Greed Makes Stupid

One can be smart, without being really intelligent. A crocodile can be smart, but it is not really intelligent. And this true not just of individuals, but of civilizations.

We live in the age of stupid. A major freeway which I know all too well, has proclaimed itself “smart”, according to the giant, very bright LED panels along it. Those “smarts” involve red lights on access ramps. By smoothing the flow in, they are supposed to make traffic smoother. And they do. On the freeway. The freeway flows a tiny bit better, but traffic jams on the streets and roads leading to said access ramps extend now for miles, and the global gridlock is worse than ever, because those blockages in turn block streets and roads parallel to the giant freeway (those secondary thoroughfares used to carry traffic parallel to that of the freeway plus local traffic; now they are parking lots).

When Obama climbed on the throne, he proclaimed that everything would get “smart”, just like He is. Example: the “smart” electric grid (as if grids had not been maximally smart before). It is true that Obama became president with what, in retrospect, were smarts tricks… rather than substance (as the ongoing crash of Obamacare demonstrates… accompanied, as it is, with the crash of nearly anything Obama touched; OK, today China’s president Xi shamed Obama into signing the Paris climate accord, COP 21, so maybe I should say thank you for consenting to save the planet a bit).

The productivity in the US, (and other leading Western countries) keeps on going down. Why? Education has been going down. We enjoy the age of stupid. We wallop in stupidity. And it shows:

Space X Sept 1, 2016 explosion. Not an accident, a system where greed has replaced expertise..

The age of stupid was inaugurated by Ronald Reagan, a remarkably stupid B movie actor whose first claim to fame had been to make the PUBLIC university of California, which had been specifically founded to provide FREE topmost education to the students of California, into an institution which only the rich could attend. Why? Because the stupid Reagan thought that was smart that only those who have money would have the keys of the world. (Then they would give careers to uneducated losers such as himself.) Reagan’s career started as a sport announcer on the radio: he was always owned by bosses full of money, and reacted to rich masters as dogs do, salivating, wagging his tail, barking in their defense.

Now, Reagan’s obscene mentality has conquered the world. It has become smart, hip, fashionable, to proclaim that Reagan was great. Even the French press views Reagan as a great president (for doing what he did not do, namely bringing the USSR down). And modest people, the non-rich, get as good an education as Reagan did, learning increasingly nothing, and most of what they learned, strictly by serving the rich.

Obama has proclaimed himself an admirer of Reagan, and a devout follower of the Financial Times. His presidency was under the sign of this doubled headed vulture.

Reagan, a creature whose fate barred him from higher mental pursuits, extolled instead the base notions of profit and greed. Profit and greed, said Reagan, were the highest, ultimate, most lofty, and most motivating pursuits of man. And a magnificently programmed Obama bleated faithfully behind. So Obama, smartly following orders, set-up Obamacare. Obamacare is characterized by insufficient spending control: so that healthcare vultures can prosper with ever more profits and greed. That, according to Reagan, Obama’s guru, will insure better health care, because greed and profit are much motivating than care (Reagan and company claimed). That’s all very smart, makes us all smart, because it is such a deeply flawed logic: greed and care do not apply to the same modes of brain operations. When one provides with care, one is not spurred by greed. These are antagonistic modes of mental operations.

Obama also decided to apply profit and greed to space: surely, that would be smart (his guru Reagan had said so). If there was profit and greed in space, space would open up, prosper, get smarter. Thus, instead of two private rocket launching companies contracting with NASA, the smart Obama fostered the creation of several others. Not understanding that the number of rocket scientists and technicians is limited.

This flurry of new space enterprises was the case of “private” companies, founded and funded… by the government. Bezos’ Blue Origins is government subsidized, because Bezos’ business, Amazon, does not pay taxes (a tax exempt status the worst of terrible men, Donald Trump, has proclaimed he would change, in his mental imbalance).

Space X, led by a self-taught engineer, Musk, smells even better: Obama gave him direct and indirect subsidies, and that was it.

Tall, telegenic Obama signed with tall, telegenic Musk a Space Act Agreement (SAA) “to develop and demonstrate commercial orbital transportation service“. (Notice the stupidity: with whom do you “commerce” in space? You set up space stations for plutocrats, thanks to their tax-exempt status?)

All this makes Musk very profitable. Penniless when Obama ascended the throne, Musk, propelled for years by billions of Obama dollars, was soon worth more than 12 billion dollars, all by himself. Let’s hope Musk is grateful and remembers who made him, after Obama retires.

In 2011, SpaceX estimated that Falcon 9 v1.0 rocket development costs were on the order of $300 million. Cheap. Investors were thrilled. Indeed, NASA evaluated that development costs would have been $3.6 billion if a traditional cost-plus contract approach had been used. (Indeed development of the new Ariane 6, which uses existing French military rockets for boosters and the existing Vulcain Hydrogen engine, will cost at least 4 billion Euros.)

Let’s stop here for a moment: Space X is supposed to be a private company. However, it develops rockets miraculously at 1/12 of their real cost, says NASA itself. Explanation? NASA has got to be making the difference (it’s helping Space X is in myriad ways). Obama invested 12 times more public money in Space X than the extremely wealthy private individuals who profit from it. Jesus turned the water into wine, Obama turned NASA into a cash cow for his friends. Mooo. Honni soit qui mal y pense.  

Can the USA do with four, five, or more rocket companies?

No.

Why not? Because launching chemical rockets is a flimsy business. In the Sixteenth Century, a Chinese inventor has been rumored to have strapped himself to a rocket propelled kite, and gaily went out in a puff of smoke. The fundamentals have not changed since: we still use chemical propulsion.

Space X uses primitive propulsion: RP1, rocket grade kerosene, basically the same as civilian jets. The more sophisticated US and European rockets use liquid hydrogen.

The flimsiness of space rockets and their engines presents the same problem as it did eight centuries ago: it requires minute attention to detail to make it work. If we had enormous power at our disposal, we could insure wide safety margins. But, for that, one would have to have more than chemical propulsion. Musk has claimed he could divide by ten the cost of launches with re-usable rockets. Experienced US companies, the Russians and Europeans aerospace engineers, beg to differ: they have long pondered the re-usability of flimsy rockets.

(Ariane Espace has now ‘project Adeline’ to recover the expensive parts of Ariane 6, mostly engine and electronics, using drone technology, in the long run; but that completely different method from recovering the entire fragile, heavy rocket would use only 1/17 of the fuel of Space X fuel stage recovery, with much fewer stresses…)

The Russians have launched more than 1,700 Soyuz, with a failure rate of 1/39. Ariane 5 has launched successfully more than 70 times in a row, putting a record 11 tons in GTO (Geostationary Orbit, 36,000 kilometers up) in August 2016.  Space X had two total losses out of 25 commercial launches… making it even worse than the notorious Space Shuttle.

Not all is bad about Space X. Musk’s notoriously bold technological spirit is refreshing, a bit like Donald Trump is refreshing. It is actually the sort of spirit which animated the Nazi engineers who developed the V2 (and then Saturn 5 in the US). There is little doubt that, to relatively little cost, one could fly heavy duty missions to Mars of Enceladus (a satellite of Saturn which has a huge ocean of water, and may harbor life, as the Cassini spacecraft, flying through plumes, found them laden with organics).

If anything, Space X forced Ariane Espace to decide cutting its launch cost by half (by scaring the French into developing Ariane 6, while forcing the Germans to give up on Ariane 5).

Yet, fundamentally, the ecology pushed by Obama of having many rocket companies cannot work. The serial explosions of Space X, in spite of its massive NASA support, demonstrate it.

At this point, rockets are too flimsy: they require great expertise from enough technicians and engineers. Say the total mass of these ‘rocket scientists’ is M. Obama decided to divide M by 6, on any specific rocket project. However, suppose one needs M/2 to operate one rocket project safely. Then Obama’s naive strategy of the more, the merrier, will lead to serial explosions, as observed. Obama, never an expert, does not seem to understand the notion of expert. Greed does not grow experts, education does.

Instead, one should go back to the strategy of the 1960s, as led by president Kennedy: big private-public projects, with clear state exploration goals. This actually built up on a strategy launched by president Roosevelt, and pursued by Eisenhower. Massive public spending on education, infrastructure, science, technology, and associated defense projects.

Efficient, large scale Space colonization, ultimately, will rest on new science, thus new education. Ultimately commuting to LEO (Low Earth Orbit) safely, efficiently, will require completely new propulsion and, or, material science (futuristic material science would allow to deploy enormous wings, and de-orbit softly, cooly and thus safely).

As I have long argued, i is clear that, to go to Mars, we need nuclear fission engines (because of radiation away from Earth’s magnetic shield, we cannot stay in space the 18 months it takes now; a nuclear fission engine could get to Mars in just 6 weeks). Space X cannot develop this: it does not have the expertise. Yet, the US has operated nuclear fission rocket engines before, and now NASA, following Russia, is warming up to the possibility again. Nuclear propulsion is what needs to be financed, instead the musky greed of eight century old technology.

The philosophy that greed does it all, is deeply flawed: otherwise crocodiles would have inherited the Earth. It is a philosophy by imbeciles, for imbeciles.

History shows that imbecility is what kills most civilizations. Imbecile leaders, though, favor imbecile followers, and an imbecile mental ecology. Nowadays, though, there is just one civilization, on one planet, and, if it dies, there is no replacement. That is why it is so important to deconstruct the planetary, Reagan-Thatcher inherited mood that greed can replace expertise.  

… While it keeps on festering, NASA’s internal watchdog, Paul Martin, called out his federal agency’s decision to allow Space X to lead the primary investigation of Space/Greed X explosion in 2015, observing it raised “questions about inherent conflicts of interest”. It is telling that the US administration, which has invested more in Space X than the private investors who stand to profit from it, is not interested by what happened to the public’s money.

Space X’s waste of taxpayer money similar to that of big banks. Both are protected by complexity so great, it escapes (according to plan) the understanding of the Commons. When the government gives your money to plutocrats, no question stands scrutiny. All the billions given to Space X, a dubious tech company, is as much money not given to fundamental research (where government is irreplaceable).

Our spaceship Earth, mismanaged by our stupid and greedy leadership, threatens to get completely out of control. All the ways out involve much more advanced technology (whether we opt for world war, or peace and concertation). Hence it is important to realize that the role of government is that of leader in matter of science and technology. And that the mood which shall lead cannot be just greed, but the most noble aspects of the human spirit.

It is the present oligarchic system which is the source of the present pandemic of stupidity. Because, given the same level of education, few brains think less well than many brains. For example, now in the US it’s down to just two minds: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, both of whom have been associated to extremely unsavory characters over the years. Anyway, how come those two are supposed to think and debate for us all? Well, for the same reason that Space X got many billions of public money. Greed. Not the honor of the human spirit.

Patrice Ayme’

No Many-Worlds Consciousness

OFF WITH DENNETT’S CONFUSED THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness is not part of science… Yet. Science will be complete, when it is. Except, and that is a huge ‘except’, possibly, most people would have to admit, consciousness may already haunt the foundations of Quantum Physics: this is what the ‘Schrodinger Cat’ paradox is all about (the lives of cats depends upon what we think!). And, indeed, I believe consciousness has to do with the Quantum.

But first I have to dispose of those who claim that consciousness is a non-problem. The famous academic philosopher Dennett asserts that consciousness has to do with brain parallelism. My friend Karen Eilbeck, a ‘biomedical informatics’ professor: “I never was satisfied with [Dennett’s] explanation of consciousness”. Indeed. Consciousness and ‘multimodal parcellation’ are completely unrelated.

It is now considered that there are around 180 different areas of the cortex, per hemisphere, each doing different things (it used to be 83 different “areas”). 

The Brain Is An Orchestra With More Than 180 Players, Per Hemisphere

As the authors of  “A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex” (August 11, 2016), have it:

“Understanding the amazingly complex human cerebral cortex requires a map (or parcellation) of its major subdivisions, known as cortical areas. Making an accurate areal map has been a century-old objective in neuroscience. Using multi-modal magnetic resonance images from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) and an objective semi-automated neuroanatomical approach, we delineated 180 areas per hemisphere bounded by sharp changes in cortical architecture, function, connectivity, and/or topography in a precisely aligned group average of 210 healthy young adults. We characterized 97 new areas and 83 areas previously reported using post-mortem microscopy or other specialized study-specific approaches. To enable automated delineation and identification of these areas in new HCP subjects and in future studies, we trained a machine-learning classifier…”

Thus the science of finding regions in the brain is more than a century old, it was not viewed as, nor has anything to do with trying to make a theory of consciousness . Yet, Dennett confuses brain activity here, there, and every way, with consciousness. 

Dennett observes that there are “various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain”. (everybody knows this: reach synapse, each neuron, even each axon and dendrite, etc.) The brain consists of a “bundle of semi-independent agencies“; when “content-fixation” takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one’s “self”.

A pretty useless ‘explanation’, dear Dennett, and not the problem of consciousness: consciousness is a feeling we all have, not just an utterance. If consciousness were an utterance, the speaking robots we are now interacting with, would be conscious. They are not. They are just algorithms. An algorithm does not have any more consciousness than a canal system. (Philosophers love to pontificate by calling what Dennett did, a ‘category error’; namely one confuses unrelated categories.)

Dennett followers claim that “subjectivity” can NEVER be made a subject to objective inquiry. That is a contradiction with the entire history of science, ever since the first Homo made the first fire.

What do I mean by this? ANY scientific theory started from a subjective experience. The first hominid who realized he could generate sparks with flints was subjectively engaged. So was the first who realized rubbing sticks could also generate incandescence. So the entire history of science, in the last three million years, has consisted, again and again and again, into turning subjectivity into objective inquiry.

When Dennett’s followers claim to have discovered that ‘subjectivity’ can never turn ‘objective’, they fail to understand that science rests precisely on this. In other words, they think as if they did not know that science is possible. Sorry to ask them to jump three million years.

Dennett looks a bit like Socrates with a big bushy beard, he is paid to utter statements viewed as philosophical, and has no doubt many other duties to attend to his enthusiastic following. So much thinking to produce, so little time, drowning in an ocean of fame. Can’t be easy.

How can fame and mental depth coincide? They are adverse to each other. It would be like getting money from oligarchs or financial monopolists, while claiming to want to help average people.

Is there really no connection whatsoever between the brain’s cortex working in plenty of little areas (brain parallelism) and consciousness? I did not say that. Dennett identifies consciousness and parallelism. That’s wrong. But that does not mean that consciousness did not evolve to make arbitrage between all these little areas, being the conductor of that otherwise discordant orchestra.

So Dennett confuses one evolutionary advantages of consciousness and the nature of consciousness. That nature probably has to do with the nature of the Quantum, and the difference between vegetal and animal. “Animal” comes from anima (soul in Latin). The soul is Quantum, this is what the Schrödinger(-Einstein) Cat thought experiment says.

Why the allusion to the “Many Worlds” Interpretation of Quantum Physics in the title? It is more than an allusion. The Many Worlds interpretation of the Quantum consists into sweeping the difficulty of how one goes from many possible outcomes to just a single one, under the rug of formalism. Instead of figuring out what is really going on, Many Worlders of physics say basically that everything and anything goes (all outcomes are ‘real’). One can say that Many World physicists shrug and answer the way Valley Girls do:”Whatever!“. Dennett does just the same. And this is not just a meta-analogy. If I am correct, and consciousness is intrinsically Quantum, the reason is exactly the same: evading a serious attempt at a deeper explanation… of the same phenomenon.

I don’t really expect celebrity physicists and celebrity philosophers to acknowledge that their cute little reasonings are shallow cope-outs, and popular, precisely because they are shallow and cute. However, the last nail in their coffins consist in pointing out that they offer an endearing, yet really terrible example of superficiality to the rest of debating society. Civilization rots by its head.

Patrice Ayme’  

Fight Burkinis With Monokinis

Burkini, Bikini,  Monokini, Naked Truth!

For at least 2,000 years, and contrary to “postmodernist” repute, France has been at the mental helm of civilization. Francia pretty much invented the legal system which “renovated” (as the Franks themselves proclaimed in 800 CE) the Greco-Roman globalization, under a more sustainable form (no more slavery, replace it with education, science and tech). This is why today’s basic world globalization is along French lines through and through (a vague feeling that it may well be so infuriates American neo-imperialists, who are partial to slavery, in their own time-honored tradition, and feel, rightly, that the French equalitarian approach is the natural enemy of their own oligarchic drive… thus explaining their friendliness to Islam).

The term “bikini” and the two piece garment named accordingly, was the invention of a French engineer, and (concurrently!) a French fashion designer. “Bikini” was an allusion to the new, explosive world made manifest at the Bikini atoll (where nuclear fission bombs were tested). It used, craftily, the prefix “bi”, for “two”, as the bikini was indeed in two pieces.

The bikini was not really new: bikini representations are around 8,000 years old (the mother goddess, Cybele, appeared that way, sometimes). The bikini was a natural technology to invent. 

Roman Bikini Babes Frolicking In Gym, Centuries Before the Famous Sexist, Murderous Rophet Married a Six Year Old, Breeding With Her, When She Was Nine!

13 centuries ago, though, the fanatical, anti-civilizational ideology known as Islam, having been irrigated by Persia and the Greco-Romans, brutally arose in the desert. A key to its sudden military success against Greeks, Romans and Persians, was to treat women as breeders, rabidly, one should say, rabbitly, breeding immense hordes of fanaticized warriors, to make Arab armies large, numerous and completely relentless. To breed a fanaticized warrior, it helps that his mother knows little, and aspire only to obey… religiously. So the future warrior will not know enough to second guess his superiors when they order him to die for the “faith”.  

To keep women subjugated, those breeding machines have to learn to enjoy obeying absurd orders, and the more absurd, and the more gleefully obedient those culture deprived morons are, the better. Naturally, breeding machines will transmit the same love for absurd orders, and lack of critical culture, to their children. Don’t laugh: this is how Islam became the world’s top war ideology (this is so obvious that even Adolf Hitler understood this, and basically said it). In one generation, Arabia was overflowing with single-minded warriors, ready to take on the world (until they met terminally with Grecian fire and Frankish steel).

Thus, many Islamist sub-ideologies (or sects, as one should call them), decided that the bodies of women should be fully covered, all the time. The absurdity was irresistible, precisely because it was so absurd.

The “burkini” (contraction of burka-bikini) was created 12 years ago, by a Lebanese Australian who had watched her niece bathing in a burka. The burkini covers the entire (presumably) shameful body of the Muslim woman, except for her feet and face, sparing beach goers of this (presumably) awful exhibition. Thirty French communes forbade the burkinis, on the ground that it broke the principle of equality of genders. Islamists were delighted. Unsurprisingly, the French State Counsel (“Conseil d’ Etat”), the highest administrative court and legal adviser of the state, found those interdictions unlawful. Today, 8/26.16.

The New York Times, of course, was delighted to jump into the fray, and it concocted an anti-French, pro-Islamist piece written by an alleged pre-college teen (actually it sounds exactly like the sort of article written by the usual committee at the new York Times). The way the USA looks at Europe, for a century, is that the more divided, and confused, the better. I sent the following comment, it was immediately censored:

‘There is no “modesty” in the burkini. Quite the opposite: it’s insolence to believe one can improve on god’s perfection, by putting a garment over a body, especially when it makes no sense, as it imprisons a body in straps, ligatures, smothering adhesion, and dripping water.

Moreover, the psychological imposition of the burkini is a desire to impose on women the feeling that their bodies are horrible, so incredibly horrible, that one should absolutely hide them. Is not that a form of psychological abuse? And as this psycho abuse is imposed only on women, assuredly, it is blatantly sexist. How can one expect women so abused to think and feel straight?

No wonder the propagandist feels insecure while writing her anti-French piece. She has been made insecure by Islamist propaganda, which insists a female body is one of the world’s great horrors, to be hidden at all and any cost.’

My position on the burkini is subtle: the garment itself is ludicrous, as the piece in the New York Times itself illustrates. But being covered up in the sun is not. 

I am in a weird position: as a young child in Africa, I covered up most of the time (against sun, heat, mosquitoes, tse-tse flies…). That was from observation, and was criticized, even ridiculed, by quite a number of adults. Of course, I was right. So I am a friend of getting dressed in the sun, and view reddening Germanoid lobsters self-cooking on the beach, with undisguised contempt.

Still I consider hard-core Salafist Islam as a plutocratic ideology friendly to military dictators, an enemy of (most) progress. And I hate gender inequality, whenever not forced by genetics (in other words, I hate sexism, be it only because it makes humanity stupid).  

So what’s the way out?

The monokini. To start with.

Yes. Don’t fight fire with fire. Fight fire with water. If wherever burkinis are found, so are naked female chests, interest for burkinis will fade away. Burkinis don’t jiggle the right way.

Amusing? Not just that. You see, Islam and its Judeo-Christian inspiration are unnatural superstition (whereas a republic is as natural as possible). A burkini, on the face of it, is as unnatural as possible. To embrace the burkini is rather a contradiction for a religion which let beards grow, and refuses to depict reality, such as painting human beings or animals, on the ground that both are perfect works of god, that one cannot improve upon!

Whereas a monokini is much closer to god. Indeed, a bikini is much more natural, much closer to god’s perfection. A burkini is an ungodly artefact, Botticelli’s Venus, a better representation of reality, as god intended it to be.

One may want to go even further, and fight the unnatural ideology of Islam with full nudity. The Islamist emperor may be clothed, but it has no brains. Fight him with the naked truth. That’s what he fears most.

Patrice Ayme’