Aphorisms June 2012

Dinosaurs Warmed Blooded After All?

Some have argued that dinosaurs had hearts like birds. Now some Spanish researchers have confirmed older studies on dinosaur bones. However the best evidence for warm blooded dinosaurs may simply be that birds evolved from bird like dinosaurs.

That latter observation is typical of the philosophical approach, in this case, using an economy of thought: since the birds, present in the last 80 million years of the dinosaurs’ reign, were warm blooded (right from the start, as flying requires lots of energy), it stretches the imagination that they would have grown wings, feathers, and become warm blooded simultaneously .

To quote the San Francisco Chronicle: …”in his conclusive argument in Nature that accompanied the report, titled “A bone for all seasons,” Kevin Padian of the UC Berkeley Museum of Paleontology noted that microscopic features of dinosaur bones show precisely the same lines of arrested development as the bones that Köhler and her colleagues studied in modern animals, which live in all the world’s climates.

“The bone growth patterns of dinosaurs establishes that they grew just like large mammals do, and at comparable rates,” Padian said in an e-mail Wednesday. “So their physiology could not have been like lizards and crocodiles, which grow much more slowly and whose bones look very different inside.”

Padian has long argued that warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals have formed a “continuum” in evolution.

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…But Are Many Thinkers Cold Blooded?

“Actually there never was any evidence that dinosaurs were ectotherms,” Padian said Wednesday. “It was just sort of like, well, dinosaurs are reptiles, and living reptiles are cold-blooded, so dinosaurs were cold-blooded too.”

The last part that I emphasized is fascinating. You see, scientists are supposed to be temples of reason. But, actually, they are not. Just like most of the commoners, scientists are careful to toe the line. Scientific revolutions are rarely engineered by anybody else but outcasts, or extremely fierce personalities.

All to often, in science physical or human, and also in philosophy, or even literature, reasoning by induction means to follow the flow of common wisdom, or common emotionality. Nothing more. The herd is safe, and the herd is thrilling, when it stampedes.

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Crazy Does It:

The big lessons from modern logic, starting with Russel, and then Goedel. Logic comes with context. Moreover, logic wants to grow out of the context that gave birth to it. But it cannot. Except when we take a (by definition not rational in the sense of the old logic) decision about what the new context will do. Thus, not only the heart has its reason that reason does not, but reason needs reasons that it does not have.

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World War Two Resistants Tell You: Behind It All, The Same Mass Criminality As In 1939:

Manolis Glezos is a 89 years old Greek. He was a European MP, and was a candidate for the radical left, against the austerity plan. For him, there is no doubt: global finance is the enemy. same as in WWII.

Some say: how do you dare assimilate what is going now with what happened with Nazism? Some even claim that what happened with Hitler is incommensurate with anything, before and after.

William Randolph Hearst, the American press magnate, was paid by Hitler, from German taxpayer money. In 2009 a visiting Jewish tourist to the “Hearst Castle” in California, recognized family paintings which had been stolen by the Nazis. Hitler gave them to Hearst in… 1935. (A lot of the Nazi economic miracle had to do with stealing opponents, and redistributing the stolen riches to supporters.) The paintings were returned by the National Park Service.

As I have long argued, it is the same (sort of) people, the same organizations who financed, and organized Nazism. The banker JP Morgan was in the lead, when Hitler was still in primary school.

That idea has also been put forward by Stephane Hessel, 94 years old, and an authentic hero of the resistance and the free French in WWII (although he was an “Israelite”, so one would think he would have laid low, but most French Jews actually were in the forefront of the armed struggle. them and the old right wing French aristocrats).

Mr. Glezos is famous in Greece. In 1941, he climbed up the Acropolis, and stole the Nazi flag that was floating there. his brother was caught, and shot, with another 700 other Greeks, that day, that hour, in that place..

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Serfdom: On Its Way Back In The USA?

I explained many times that Obama’s ironically labeled “Affordable Health Care Act” was unconstitutional. But Roberts, Chief Justice, a Bush right wing appointee, found it constitutional. Am I an idiot?

No: Chief Justice Roberts just decided the obligation of getting into a private contract with a private health insurance company was a “tax“. That I did not expect. It is of course incorrect in a res-publica, because, in a republic, taxation is only paid to the government.

The naïve on the left applaud: they do not see that Obamacare was right wing. Now Roberts has gone further right. Makes sense.

Indeed, is there a precedent? Assuredly, private taxation was deemed to be correct when the Frankish authorities established the feudal system. (Private taxation culminated with the “Fermiers Generaux“, who were decapitated in the French revolution.)

However, the Franks had kept some republican decency. The Franks knew that it made no sense to force commoners into contracts with private parties (in this case the Lords), in a republic. The Roman empire they had reconstituted, the Imperium Romanorum, was, after 800 CE, as in its preceding version, based in Rome and Constantinople, viewed as a sort of republic. After all the Frankish kings were -supposedly- elected!

Thus Frankish law made a principle that serfs were in a contract with the lords, because the lords provided services. When those services were discontinued (say because the serfs fled), this contract was broken (that it was broken by the serf was irrelevant). Thus the serf was relieved of this contract. Hence, if a serf ‘escaped’ for 30 days, he was a plain, normal Frank, that is, he, or she, was free. Many of the newly freed went to the cities. Cities did not depend upon lords (except for the rather theoretical oversight of the imperial government, that is, in France, or England, the king).

No such opportunity in the present USA.

I spent last weekend with a health care professional, a top notch doctor, who told me how to rack up the medical bills by 100%, for the benefit of the doctor signing such bills. In several ways. I will not give any details at this point, because it was rather confidential.

Taxpayer money irrigating uncontrolled corruption reeks of plutocratic perversion. Obamacare will change that not. However, the American left’s tenors are officially happy: more taxpayer money to be sent to plutocrats, so that they take care of the commoners. An American creed is that to be rich is good, and one proof is that the rich are good (that’s why they are called “philanthropists“).

Chairs have been re-arranged on the Titanic, the commoners are happy, the orchestra is still playing, the sea is calm: what could go wrong on SS USA?

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When Confusion Is A Weapon:

A trick was found, long ago: playing dumb, allowing to do evil, as if by accident.

The idea is to confuse the issue of deliberate evil behind the smokescreen of, well, complete confusion. There is no magic, but there are people doing as if they believed in it, and their alleged idiocy allows them to hide their Dark Side. Various superstitions and religions have been used that way too.

Ultimately the principle is always the same: excusing one’s evil behind a thick cloud of playing dumb.

The Iraq invasion was propelled by total evil: on Fox News, luminaries were claiming that the invasion would pay for itself. A minimal aim was achieved: to demolish Iraq as an independent force. Iraqi oil is pretty much shut down at this point, and that allowed the USA to switch to fracking, while, of course, Iraq was prevented to trade in euros…

Now Americans are coming up, explaining to us all that they just confused reason and magic. But, when Obama targets families for assassination (as the New York Times recently claimed), it’s not because Obama believes in magic. It’s because he believes in evil.

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Athens Had Direct Democracy, We Have Kings;

Representative democracy, clearly, does not work. Ancient Athens used a form of direct democracy (the ecclesia, the popular assembly, had 43,000 members). Even the Populus of republican Rome kept, for many centuries, a very tight leash on elected officials (Consul were elected for a year, but the powers rotated between the two Consuls on a monthly basis).

Right now we elect kings with more powers than kings of passed ages ever had. Then we pretend the People rules. But if it walks like a king, speaks like a king, rules like a king, and even order assassinations in full view, as Obama does, it is a king.

In a first reform, one should adopt a Swiss like system, where a seven member Federal Council rules, rather than one person (although there is a president, elected for a year within the council). In Europe, parliament could elect the Commission, or something like that.

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 Something Economists Don’t Understand: The Economy Is Not Fundamentally About Money:

Economy is, ultimately, what the state decides to do, some of which it calls “the market”. For example, in the USA, the military-industrial complex is (still) strong.
When the state decides nothing, and, instead, let the unelected bankers, and other plutocrats run amok, we don’t lose just democracy, but even the economy. This is what we observe presently.

Two heads of the Camerkozy are still alive and biting the destitute, by the way…

Being a full human being is an indispensable way for making one’s thoughts better, and deeper.  Greed is not enough that way. Yet, thinking is man’s most productive work. To overlook this is a major flaw of conventional socio-economic thinking.

The Internet is a storm in which minds get easily spread about to the four winds, for the best, and the worst. An advantage, and a threat.

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 How To Save Rhinoceroses:

Just harvest their horns in official programs. After the horn has been cut, the rhinoceros loses its financial value. Yet, the horn regrows. Thus rhinoceroses’ horns can be harvested. Domesticated rhinos don’t mind. They use their horns in combat. But, on a farm, they don’t have to fight (actually horns have been cut by rangers on wild rhinos from particularly threatened sub species!)

Rhino horn material is worth several times gold, by weight. Something about China. So farming rhinos for their horns could pay for much nature conservation… Besides saving entire rhino species.

Making the profit motive a friend of conservation, an ally to the biosphere: that’s not re-arranging the chairs on the Titanic, while playing democratic music. The sea is not calm. The sea is rising, faster and faster. Planet Earth is sinking.  We can do better than re-arranging chairs and playing irrelevant music.

A way to achieve serious relief, would be with a carbon tax. After all, carbon burning has already killed hundreds of times more than nuclear (even including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which is not fair). But have Obama and company the sort of brains, and guts needed to impose a carbon tax? Not, so far (even though it would solve the Taxgameddon problem).

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Patrice Ayme

Tags: Dinosaurs, Mass Criminality, Systems Thought