Western Civilization Is Not Christian

Needed Guidance For Naïve, Deluded Christians:

Let me emphasize at the outset that there is everything good in embracing the good aspects of Christianity, as those fit human ethology at its best. Ethics, indeed, is absolute.

Christianism is, of course, much more than ethics at its best. It is also the superstition tyrannical Roman emperors running out of ideas, but not of Satanism, imposed on the Greco-Roman Empire.

The creator of Christianism was Emperor Constantine. He killed many, including most of those closest to him: his wife (steamed), his famous and talented son, and his nephew.

Thirteenth Apostle, Emperor Constantine: Homicidal Tyrant, Founder, Christian State Religion

Christianism, hopefully, is a spent force. Yet it retains some vitality, as it rests on some myths, which are outright lies. It’s important to demolish them, be it only as an example to Islamism.

Among those lies was that the Roman Empire hated Christians and killed millions of them. The truth is the exact opposite: imperial Christians killed millions.

Another myth is Jesus himself. Still another myth is that France was a very Catholic country with a special relationship to the Church (France was said to be the “eldest daughter of the [Catholic] Church“).

The importance of the latter myth is that the Franks, Francia, created Western Civilization, by “renovating”, as they put it themselves, the Roman Empire.

By claiming that Francia was infeodated to the Catholic Church, the Christians were able to claim that we, who owe everything to Western Civilization, owe something to the “Lord” (allegedly their nowhere man, Christ, but actually any plutocrat above, who wanted to be called “Lord”).

Thus arose the myth that Western Civilization was, somehow, “Christian Civilization”.

Yet, a quick study of Charlemagne’s life shows that he certainly believed in study and philosophy (some of his closest advisers were the top philosophers of the time, for example Prime Minister Alcuin). Charles also believed Christianism was a very efficient military weapon. And that having ten wives was better than having just one. And that to be called “David” as if he were the king of the Jews was a good approach to life (for those in the know, God, aka Jesus’ dad, tortured to death David’s son… to punish David… that’s the Christian way…)

So let’s now dispel those myths with a bit more description of what happened:

The Roman Empire was pretty well organized: we know that exactly 6 people got executed under Marcus Aurelius for charges related to Christianity. The most famous case was that of a high officer and author who rejected his military oath. He was made into a Saint, of course.

There is no direct evidence for a Mr. Jesus Christ having ever lived. Three Christ-like Bible inspired crazies, with fates broadly similar to the fate of the alleged Jesus got duly condemned, and executed, during that century when Jesus was supposed to live. We have detailed proofs of their existences. The contrast is striking between the evidence in these historical cases and the total lack of direct historical evidence for Jesus.

It is enlightening to read that Saint Paul, the first human to evoke Mr. Jesus Christ, admits that he never met Jesus in the flesh… but in his head.

Only fools could not suspect something fishy: is not Saint Paul admitting he made up Jesus in his head? (Saint Paul, a Roman prosecutor condemned to death by the Jews, was spirited away by Roman authorities; nobody knows what happened to him, as Roman officialdom was anxious not to spite the Jewish authorities too blatantly).

There were only around 3,000 Christians executed under Emperors Diocletian and Galerius (it all started with too many very high officials and at Court, making the sign of the cross!).

With those Christians executed for which ever reasons over more than 250 years, maybe we have been double that number of Christians executed. But there were never millions of Christians executed. It was actually legal to be a Christian (with freedom of cult but for a very few years, when Christians, and especially priests, were required to take an oath to the state… Not differently than what would happened during the French Revolution, 15 centuries later).

Yet, because of their secretive, paramilitary ways, and dislike of Jews (extremely numerous in the Empire), Christians often got in trouble.

Galerius, maybe delirious from cancer, called off the Diocletianic Persecution when he issued an edict of toleration in 311.

The Roman emperor Constantine, the self-declared “13th Apostle” (and, of course, a Saint, like the famous sadist Saint Louis) selected and invented Catholicism (Constantine called and presided the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE). Constantine imposed Christianism fiscally on the empire. Emperor Theodosius, a Spanish general, imposed it with lethal force (so the Christians killed millions, and this is why they pretend it was the other way around)…

So Christianism aka “Orthodox Catholicism”, as it was known, became the Roman State religion. Only the Jews got tolerated enough to not be massacred outright.

Thus, far from being eaten by lions in the millions, imperial Christians devoured civilization for more than three centuries as deranged tyrants. All the books and intellectuals fled to Persia. The empire got immensely weakened by the flight of the intellectuals. (Then the Muslim raiders swooped in, gobbling Persia and much of the empire in a few years.)

In the North-West of the Empire, the Franks took power and humbled the Catholic Church, while re-establishing the freedom of cult, de facto.

Catholics, mostly because of the dreadful influences of the semi-demented tyrant, Louis XIV, and the slave master Napoleon, had acquired an imbalanced power in France that they did not have before, in most of the history of France.

There were Protestants in France since the 12th Century, and they were sometimes top rulers: the Comte de Toulouse, Admiral Coligny (who was Prime Minister), and even the most admired Henri IV.

The Jews were treated equally for 6 centuries, throughout the Renovated Roman Empire, until the First Crusade (pogroms in Alsace and further east), and the rule of dictators like the abominable Saint Louis. The thoroughly despicable Louis XIV threw millions of Protestants out of France, terrifying, molesting and torturing the rest. France, the place were Protestantism was invented, degenerated into infamy. France became a shadow of her former self. Louis’ grandfather, Henri… had been the Protestant-in-Chief. What a dreadful piece of history!

Jews were re-recognized as full citizens in 1789.

All this to say that real “French Intellectuals” cannot be Catholic (apparent exceptions are illusions).

The famed relationship between France and the Catholic Church was that of master (the Franks) to a tool.

Yet, as Catholicism is intrinsically fascist, Absolute Monarchy, when it arose, starting with the first official king of France, Philippe-Auguste (1165-1223), found in Catholicism a convenient justification for its tyranny of biblical proportion. Just as Constantine had.

Patrice Ayme’

Why Plutocrats Like Pollution

The obvious reason for the wealthy to love pollution is that fossil fuels companies dominate the present economy, and they own most of it. Yet the psychoanalysis of plutocracy reveal much deeper and sinister reasons, for this perversion.

Paul Krugman makes in his “Pollution and Politics” (Nov 28) the observation that the wealthy sponsors of the Republican Party have the pecuniary interest to pursue with fossil fuels, and their attending pollution.

Careful, as usual to not hurt the feelings of the mighty, Krugman did not mention the evaluation, from the World Health Organization, and other knowledgeable institutions, that seven million human beings die, each year, from carbon burning pollution.

He also forgets to mention that the poor tend to live where it is more polluted, say along freeways, and the wealthiest in the most pristine places, such as mountain tops or remote islands (Aspen, Obama’s Bali). Preventing pollution can be done, but it eats profit margins.

Yet, it one should go much further than this: defending pollution is a way for the plutocrats to inure We The People to viciousness:

ENLIGHTENING THE CONCEPT OF PLUTOCRACY IN ITS FULL HORROR:

Hades acquired a very bad reputation, so his name got changed to Pluto, an early example of the tritest manipulation of language. While metamorphosing into Pluto, though, Hades acquired further nefariousness. Pluto was the god of all things underground, from riches, such as silver, gold and precious stones, to all things undercover, including darkness of purpose, invisibility and hell.

Thus Hell-rule (Pluto-cracy) is thus not just the rule of money. Plutocracy is not just the rule of greed. It is not just the rule of unfairness, injustice. It is also the rule of all the emotions, strategies and tactics necessary to implement all this nastiness.

As all that nastiness, piled up high, is deeply abhorrent to human nature, it has to be applied with generous viciousness, and the more viciousness, the more necessary it has been to become even more vicious.

A crook such as Nixon was amateurish: he did his nasty misdeeds with a few accomplices, drew, all by himself, enemy lists, organized a break-in. He did not put all the power of the state to bear, to further viciousness (as the FBI’s Hoover, or the Nazi friendly Dulles, had done before).

Now though, viciousness has reached industrial proportion, it contributes massively to GDP. An example is the giant banks. They caused the 2008 crash, an under-performing economy, and increasing inequality (by lending to the richest of the rich, preferentially, and making, more generally the richest of the rich ever richer).

Yet, they got rewarded for all this. The Fed was recently admitting its gifts to the banks since 2009 (“Quantitative Easing”) total more than 4 trillion dollars ($4,000 billion).

In the 1980’s Reagan and his sponsors told us: “Greed is good, and it’s the only thing that’s good for the economy”.

Thus the rise of plutocrats. Plutocrats love to breed and multiply: thanks to their advice, Russia became a preserve, where they run wild.

Plutocracy is incompatible with democracy, by definition. So the plutocrats have a problem: once the Demos finally understands this, the Demos will want to shut Hell Rule, Plutocracy, down. Plutocrats are smart enough to guess that. They can see even the Pope, to great applause of the Atheist European Parliament, condemn the “austerity”, which the latest device plutocrats have invented to transfer money from the People to themselves.

The Pope used to be on their side (Pi XII wrote to Hitler, Ghandi-like, calling him “my friend”).

To stabilize their rule, plutocrats need to persuade We The People that viciousness and the rule of the few are the ultimate values, just as they successfully persuaded We The People that greed made the economy optimal.

So the plutocrats have engaged in a program of mental vaccinations: condition We The People to accept the intolerable, and infamy, learn to call it “philanthropy”.

To create a cult of viciousness, plutocratic propaganda is going over the top, embracing dubious causes, such as pollution. The more dubious, the better.

So we are told to love pollution and climate change, as in the fifties We The People were told to love the Bomb.

Plutocracy wants viciousness, rejecting loving values, to become normal. As in many of the Twentieth Century totalitarian regimes.

And what better way to achieve the rule of hell than making the viciousness of a cause its ultimate justification?

Patrice Ayme’

Wingsuit Philosophy: 400 Million Years Strong

 

If Life is Quantum, why do Quantum assemblies jump off cliffs and peaks in wingsuits, with a high probability to be blown to bits? (See flying off the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey, Mont Blanc Range.)

Is it the love of danger? What else? Indeed, most of these ladies and gentlemen, when interviewed, insist that they love life. And most of them, indeed, seem to enjoy life, and are extremely lively.

Flier Jumped Off Peuterey (Peak on the Right)

Wingsuit flying is an extreme form of extreme sport. It entangles extreme neurological control, extreme speed, and extreme terror. Plus extreme contempt for probabilities. In other words, all what makes man tick where it counts most, in what counts most, in battle.

The film concludes with a list of more than two dozen wingsuit fliers known to have died in 2013, while practicing their passion.

The first attempted wingsuit flight, more than a century ago, was off the Eiffel Tower (then the world’s tallest structure). The gentleman long hesitated before jumping. He received a significant hole in his head. However, an autopsy revealed that he had died of a heart attack during the flight (so great was his fright?). Frenchmen invented the modern suits in the 1990s. Tubes inflated by air pressure rigidify them. The explicit aim was to land with them (to do this, I believe a 6 meter wing span is needed, thus further, hard, but imaginable, progress in material science).

Wingsuited Corliss Popping Balloons Before Zooming Into A Gorge

So why is danger lovable? Danger is not just lovable, it is adaptative, in the evolutionary sense of the term. That means that, for human beings, to love danger present greater advantage that the alternative. Can I prove it? Well, wingsuit flying and all sorts of behaviors potentially lethal to those who indulge in them, are only explainable by the thrill of danger. If this thrill is perceived as more valuable than life, it’s that life cannot do without it.

As Sherlock Holmes noticed, when one has eliminated all other explanations, what’s left is what is going on.

The usual suspects, the loud vegetarians, mosquito lovers, peaceniks, Dalai Lama worshippers, partisans of the intrinsic goodness of man in general, and of the extreme placidity and sanctity of themselves in particular, will meekly bleat that from such violence comes the undoing of man. Assuredly, they will reckon, loving danger leads to war, mayhem, and horror of horror, violence, to put it in one hated word.

Yet, what is man if not the creature of ultimate force? Violence is how man was built, one mutation at a time.

After these vigorous considerations, I went running more than twenty miles in the mountains, some of it above 8,000 feet. Never mind a little snow and ice: the greenhouse presents advantages in late November. At some point I met some mountain bikers: ”What are you doing, so far from anywhere?” I did not tell them I was philosophying, as I already looked crazy enough with my skimpy outfit (running is higher metabolism than biking).

Back in the land of computers, I stumbled on an interview of Jeb Corliss, an expert of “proximity flying” (see above). He reached pretty much the same conclusions as yours truly, in an interesting article with a stupid title:

“Courting popularity has never been a priority for Corliss. “Listen,” he tells me, “I talk about the deaths. I talk about the disasters.”

“And if you die?”

“If I die, I want that footage on TV the next day.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because this is not chess. This is not backgammon. This is not . . . ” (Corliss racks his brain for a yet-more-contemptible pastime, and finds one) “golf. This is dangerous. I believe that footage of fatalities is way more important than film of some guy flying across a beautiful meadow. What we are doing here is very important. I believe that flying is what evolution is about. Think of the squirrels.”

“OK.”

“At the beginning, there were probably only a very few squirrels that even contemplated flying from tree to tree. The other squirrels thought they were crazy. I imagine hundreds of them died in the attempt. But then, in the end, one of them managed it. Now that, to me, is evolution. And now we are evolving, through technology and through skill. I liken what we’re doing in proximity flying to the first animals that left the water. We are evolving and growing. And becoming stronger. What else,” he asks, “is the purpose of life?”

The usual suspects, if they have time to stop grazing their pastures, will call the preceding Nietzschean, or Hitlerian, and condemn it. But that would be wrong on both counts: Nietzsche hated evolution, and Hitler loved regression. Corliss’ philosophy wants progress. That philosophy, which has been mine, ever since I reflected in the wastes of Africa, is very close to Lamarck, and… Sade.

400 million years ago, during the Devonian Period, the earliest tetrapods derived from the lobe-finned fishes.

It is an important point that, although plants did not need brains to conquer the land, brainy animals, having brains, had to decide to conquer land.

Strict “Darwinists” speak as if they cannot understand this, and brains are just what genes do (see in particular Dawkins). Does that mean they never decide anything, except what class and genes gave them? (Lord Matt Ridley, one of the most strident advocates of total gene control, and of plundering the planet, is a major and most propagandizing plutocrat; believing “genes” control all means class controls all).

Yet, that’s obviously wrong: if all and any fish had been so terrified of land that they had not tried to crawl on it, all the mutations in the world would not have made the vertebrates conquer land.

For 400 million years, our brainy ancestors took great chances, and very few of those who took the greatest chances, that is, the most lethal chances, could reproduce. They died early, they died hard, but they tried something crazy, to give some mutation a chance… And, as we will see in a companion essay, a chance for this mutation to appear!

Without the will to progress, there would have been no progress. There would be only plants, bacteria, viruses.

Patrice Ayme’

Bad Government Economics: The Case Of Ignored Hydrogen

To FOSTER RENEWABLES, the HYDROGEN ECONOMY NEEDS TO BE DEVELOPED.

How Government Ought NOT to Act Economically:

I am often mean to Obama, all the more as I know that, after all, he is just the president. So he presides over a whole system of oligarchies. Best economic advice? For the “Democratic” establishment, it meant Larry Summers, Bob Rubin, Bill Clinton, Greenspan, etc. Who was he to contradict Summers or Krugman? Those two were within the White House nearly 30 years before Obama got there. They both, and all other very serious economists, told Obama he had to save the banks, no strings attached.

In the matter of energy and science policy, Obama made apparently the best choice: Chu, a Physics Nobel Prize winner who was also the successful manager of the giant Lawrence Berkeley Research Laboratory.

But getting a Nobel in something does not mean one has the best ideas, especially in other fields. It can make one arrogant, stubborn, over-confident in one’s brains.

In the end, the government of the USA intervened erroneous, moving away from fundamental research (both in science and the foundations of technology).

Dr. Chu cancelled all research in fuel cells, while instead diverting money towards… start-ups. He may as well have financed hamburger stands. In particular, Chu decided to finance electric cars. This means, in practice cars made by Elon Musk, an expert on how to get government support.

A French electric car held the world’s speed record, and was first to reach 100km/h. That was in… 1900. So electric cars are not exactly new. Batteries are better than 115 years ago. But still, not good enough.

Battery technology will require a breakthrough: this is why it has been so difficult to make buses, or trucks, using electric batteries. The battery packs tend to be too heavy, the range too limited, the time to refuel, too great.

A number of Asian companies, including Toyota, are leasing Fuel Cell Cars. They work by transforming hydrogen into electricity. The city of Berkeley has been using, for years, Fuel Cells buses. They proudly carry the mention that their waste is pristine water.

Elon Musk called Fuel cell cars, “fool” cars. At best, he does not know how to spell. At worst, he knows no physics (and that’s the case). Fuel cells have enormous efficiency. Musk’s “electric” cars, actually run on COAL electricity for 50% (as the whole USA does, at this point, 2014 CE). I know Musk talks about the sun to recharge his cars, but that’s not (yet) the case. The solar case would have to go through hydrogen!

But of course, this is not about physics, but politics. Musk got billions from the Federal Government, from NASA.

So the fools are those who believe the crafty politician, Elon Musk… without seeing what’s behind.

OK, electric vehicles have their uses, for short commutes. They are great against local pollution. But let’s not run out of lithium? OK? As it is, the Tesla Model S, which gets a $10,000 subsidy per vehicle, is perfect for Californian plutocrats who want to have priority on the roads, while enjoying the money they get from taxpayers for driving in style.

The main problem with renewable energies, right now, is that there is no way to store it efficiently (aside from dams). Cracking water to make hydrogen would be an obvious way. (Another obvious way to store the electricity from  photovoltaics is to evaporate seawater, condensate and store the resulting water. Most cities with access to the sea and a water problem could use that method.)

Liquid Hydrogen has about THREE times the energy of gasoline per mass. As existing fuel cells have twice the efficiency of the hypothetical maximum of a thermal engine (where electric vehicles get their electricity from), one sees that a fuel cell cars, far from being foolish, if the hydrogen were from renewables, would be at least six times more efficient than electric vehicles.

Under Obama, Secretary Chu, in an apparent act of corruption, quit all fundamental research of fuel cells, and diverted money to his friends [1]. But fuel cells allowed Americans to land on the Moon. Now Chu is sitting pretty in Stanford, complete with start-up money, a few miles from Tesla.

Chu in his own words:

http://www.thenewsdaily.org/steven-chu-lives-in-fantasy-world-public-states-the-kickback-scheme-that-got-him-his-stanford-job-as-part-of-his-payoff-was-not-failed/

A Hydrogen Economy is necessary. See:

TERMINAL GREENHOUSE CRISIS

This Chu misadventure shows the superiority of Direct Democracy: had Chu’s policies be widely debated over the Internet, and had Obama got a digest of the conclusions, it is highly unlikely that he (and scientifically ignorant, dubiously enriched very wealthy California Senator Feinstein, etc.) would have decided to go along with Chu’s craziness.

Recently Paul Krugman, still uninformed in that respect, was lauding Chu’s policies in the New York Times, and how much money they made (this is not just false, but it shows further misunderstanding of the role of government… Which is not to compete with for-profit companies).

The truth is that, the fundamental research breakthroughs are not coming up at the rate they would be, if the opposite of what Chu did had been, instead, implemented (that is massive more fundamental research).

It’s not just a question of the advancement of civilization, but of national defense.

Hydrogen liquefied or compressed, or chemically transformed in a more amenable fluid form, and then used as storage from energy of photovoltaics and wind, is the best way to make sense of renewables.
…That’s why it was not developed, as our Great Leaders are sold to big oil and its banks.

Patrice Ayme’

[November 2014…]

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[1] What else than corruption? Assuredly, Chu is not that dumb. Assuredly, he knew the US made it to the Moon thanks to hydrogen fuel cells making electricity (hence the explosion of Apollo 13…)… because fuel cells are highly efficient, etc.

Censoring “Electrocoal”, Violating Democracy

“Scientific American” Censors “Electrocoal”, Violating Free Speech, the Status of the Internet as Public Utility, And, More Generally, Democracy:

President Obama declared last week that the Internet was a Public Utility. Rightly so. Say you build up a bridge. Does that give you the right to do whatever you want with the bridge when people use it? Not so, especially if the bridge has become a Public Utility.

Any media using the Internet is, to some extent, a Public Utility, because the Internet is a Public Utility.

Expression on the Internet is what Free Speech has become now.

A fundamental democratic right in Athens was that of addressing the Assembly.

There should be a right of free speech answer, especially when a site allows public comments.

More generally, the Internet is in need of laws, with the core aim of enabling Free Speech, and disallowing Hate Speech. Commercial, For-Profit Speech ought to be regulated: commerce is always regulated.

As it is, the Internet is the Wild West, and those with the biggest guns rule. Comments, rankings, private information and access are manipulated all over. Some companies’ business is actually to write fake comments and reviews, while passing for non-profit oriented free speech individuals: this ought to be considered consumer fraud, and the appropriate laws ought to be passed to criminalize the activity.

Scientific American is in the habit of censoring comments: “deciding what material is displayed on our website is our right”. They have censored strict scientific comments from me (without explanation).

A law ought to be passed forbidding public utilities to censor comments without some excellent reason. (Journalists are above the law in the sense that they do not have to reveal their sources, nor can be tried for opinion; so journalism always has a public utility aspect at its root.)

Take the example of Free Speech in the street: it is a right of democracy. Yet it can be curtailed by the police if, and only if, it “disrupts the peace”, or violates other laws. In practice, the police rarely intervenes (in democracy, it would have to justify its intervention!)

Scientific American censors, and others, such as Facebook, have argued that their website is their own property, they can do what they want. Well, not really. The problem is that they are in position of monopoly (or more exactly, oligarchy). Then, to empower their oligarchy, they use, and need to use, a Public Utility. That means they are financed by the citizenry in general. Moreover, they got a fiduciary duty: informing and debating in a non grossly misleading, non injurious way.

I related that The Economist censored me for quoting the Qur’an (no, I did not join the Jihad; my aim was to show that, at face value, the Qur’an calls for violent acts, and, thus, the need for Imams to inform believers that this is all allegorical, and outlawing interpretations that are stricto sensu).

In an article on fuel cell cars, the SA Master allowed dozens of comments from (taxpayer financed) Elon Musk’s minions, calling fuel cell cars “fool cars”. That was not censored. I replied in kind.

Scientific American censored me for calling electric cars, ELECTROCOAL. So doing, I claim that Scientific American violated the notion of PUBLIC UTILITY.

Scientific American sent me the following email:

“This comment has been deleted. Scientific American reserves the right to delete comments and revoke commenting privileges without notice. A subscription does not exempt you from our rules, and deciding what material is displayed on our website is our right, not censorship. You can create your own website for your own opinions and views, to share with the world. Scientific American does not owe anyone a platform – anyone may create a website of their own.

This comment is off-topic. Further violations will result in the loss of your commenting privileges, so please review our guidelines carefully. This help desk will not provide another warning.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/page/sa-community-guidelines/

Regards,

SA Webmaster”

[Notice the contradictions and the weasel words, Big Brother speech: censorship desk is called “help desk”, and “further violations…no other warning”.] “Webmaster” is an interesting Freudian slip: in a free society, the Internet should have laws, not “masters”.

Calling Tesla Electric Cars “electrocoal” is an allusion to the fact that electric cars in the USA are loaded with electricity that is half produced in coal thermal plants. So their global efficiency is that of a coal burning installation (more on this in another essay).

The Masters at Scientific American don’t like “electrocoal”. So they censor it, and call me a “violator”. And threaten to unilaterally cancel a contract with me, while still taking my money. No law prevents them to indulge in all these abuses of power.

Just as no law prevents Uber, an Internet based car-rental company, to use the private information it gathers on its clients, tracking them, selling the data.

Uber has apologized. But there should be a law, and employees, and owners, who have violated that law ought to go to jail. Yes, shareholders ought to be punished, as those who owned shares in companies that make money from slaves, ought to be punished; believe or not, those are still around!

Laws are not censorship, they are the common rules which apply equally. Private censorship, though, while using the Public Utility of the Internet, is a violation of said equality, which is the essence of democracy. Violation of democracy ought to be unlawful, just as the equally vaguely defined “hate speech”, or “genocide” are unlawful.

The problem is the same as when plutocrats use publicly financed research to increase their wealth or power (thus scientific publishing ought to be open source, and subsidies from the likes of NASA to private enterprises subject to serious examination… same as subsidies to big banks).

The ultimate reason for democracy, is not fairness, but intelligence. That makes even dictators long for democracy. Democracy allows the group to reach higher intelligence than any other society. The Internet is a tool to further the debate of ideas (ideas which do not violate the law, including hate speech, that is).

Violating the free debate of ideas ought to be left to dictators, and other “Masters”. It ought to be illegal in democracy.

The right of reply ought to be enshrined in democracy. The manipulations of commentary, and censorship for profit or bullies’ sake, or for perverting the minds of the public or children (see Islamism) ought to be illegal, even if done under the cover of higher morality, or hypocrisy.

Internet policing will not solve all the problems of vicious thinking, but it will allow to threaten to address the most egregious of them.

Patrice Ayme’

Government Is The Employer of Last Resort

Yes, life is quantum. Generalization, generalization… What else can be generalized? Economics, of course. Traditionally, economics is about money. Guess what? Money is doing very well.

But economics ought to be about workers. Then workers will do as well as money is doing now.

A famous fact is that Central Banks are “Lenders of Last Resort”. And who are the banks lending to? The Rich. How come one never talks about the employer of last resort?

Another thing that can be generalized, is the Great Depression. I was totally right to call the present economic degeneracy the “Greater Depression”

Money Velocity Is The Worse Ever: Deflation Coming.

Yes, worse than in the so-called “Great Depression”. That’s why Putin is angry. (All powerful and angry: a bad cocktail.)

M2 is the total quantity of money in people’s hands, or their saving accounts. The M2 Velocity, measure of economic activity, is collapsing, lower than ever seen before (I will produce a full graph over a century another time; I had a problem with my Federal Reserve account). M2 velocity predicts deflation. Samuelson discovered M2 velocity varied:

“In terms of the quantity theory of money, we may say that the velocity of circulation of money does not remain constant. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” You can force money on the system in exchange for government bonds, its close money substitute; but you can’t make the money circulate against new goods and new jobs.”

In other words, Quantitative Easing is not work (take this, Krugman!)

In the giant Inca empire, there was plenty of work, and the main employer was the government. (Things went well, until smallpox showed up, courtesy, and advance guard, of the Castilians…)

When Darius founded his giant empire, his government was the employer of first resort, building a giant road system. Later Darius switched to other forms of economic governance, including free market capitalism. The Achaemenid Empire was such a stunning success, not doubt because of the extremely activist stance of its economic governance. (Athens reciprocated in kind, with just as active private-public military industrial complex.)

Here is Paul Krugman in “Rock Bottom Economics. The Inflation and Rising Interest Rates That Never Showed Up”:

“Six years ago the Federal Reserve hit rock bottom. It had been cutting the federal funds rate, the interest rate it uses to steer the economy, more or less frantically in an unsuccessful attempt to get ahead of the recession and financial crisis. But it eventually reached the point where it could cut no more, because interest rates can’t go below zero. On Dec. 16, 2008, the Fed set its interest target between 0 and 0.25 percent, where it remains to this day.

The fact that we’ve spent six years at the so-called zero lower bound is amazing and depressing. What’s even more amazing and depressing, if you ask me, is how slow our economic discourse has been to catch up with the new reality. Everything changes when the economy is at rock bottom — or, to use the term of art, in a liquidity trap (don’t ask). But for the longest time, nobody with the power to shape policy would believe it.

What do I mean by saying that everything changes? As I wrote way back when, in a rock-bottom economy “the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.”

Indeed. Reason emanates from the Quantum, and what does the Quantum do, when boxed-in, with no classical way out? It tunnels out!

This is exactly why bacterial genetics can exhibit intelligent behavior (as Lamarck correctly anticipated); a changed environment changes the Quantum tunneling prospects, and can induced “directed mutagenesis”[John Cairns, Harvard U., 1988).

So intelligence ought not to be boxed in. Folly is often the best wisdom.

Economics, at this point, has been completely boxed in by the plutocrats.

Krugman again:

“Government spending doesn’t compete with private investment — it actually promotes business spending. Central bankers, who normally cultivate an image as stern inflation-fighters, need to do the exact opposite, convincing markets and investors that they will push inflation up. “Structural reform,” which usually means making it easier to cut wages, is more likely to destroy jobs than create them.

This may all sound wild and radical, but it isn’t.”

The bottom line is that there is not enough economic activity. Rather than repeating what I have said in the past, here is a new argument.

The reason interest rates are so low is that there is too much money for too little employment proposed. So money is not in demand.

If money were in demand, banks would pay for it.

So the bottom line is that work has to be created. Those who have money, the plutocrats and their agents, have no interest to create work, by investing capital, as this would make them dependent upon workers.

Instead they have increasing means, from financial derivatives to robots, to complicit central banks, and fiscal tolerance, to make money from capital without using human capital. The more they do it, the more they like it, the more vicious they get, and the more inclined they are to do it some more.

So what is the way out? Just as the government (in its role as central bank) is the lender of last resort, the government is the employer of last resort.

We are now experiencing the last resort. Thus the government needs to create employment. It can do this in two ways:

1) making it easier for business activity. Say by taking spectacular fiscal measures: as it is some corporations, typically very large pay very little taxes, why small ones are suffering from the opposite: way too much taxation. Most jobs are from the small businesses, most clout, and corruption, from the very large ones. This is a case where more democracy would lead to more economic activity, by creating a fairer market.

2) by outright paying people to work. An obvious target would be to create jobs in education and fundamental research.

Instead, our friend, the naïve, ill-advised Obama has decreased fundamental research, instead stuffing his “friends” and helpers with subsidies.

There are several promising leads with thermonuclear fusion (in part from more advanced electronics). But the government refuses to finance the research as much as it deserves (austerity for research, cornucopia for plutocrats).

Students are forced to borrow to attend ever more expensive universities. That forces them into “profitable” fields, which do not profit society at all.

The times are crying for massive investments in education, research, green infrastructure, cheap and efficient mass transportation and housing.

None of these projects can bring a quick buck. So the notion of profit is not relevant. Instead this infrastructure economy will quick-start the for-profit economy.

Is there an economy working that way somewhere? Well, yes, Switzerland. There, propped by the citizenry, the governmental economy, which is generally at the level of the canton, is very active.

Direct democracy mitigates massive corruption.

So, as Samuelson noticed, we need to go well beyond giving more money to the largest banks (Crude Men’s approach, called Quantitative Easing). We need to follow Roosevelt approach, the old synthesis of government and economy, long practiced by the most advanced civilizations, from Persia, to Greece, to Rome, to the Tang in China…

Provide people with hugely useful work. Recently the Chinese government was working on its system of grand canals. At some point, 14 centuries ago, a particular canal in that system provided three million laborers with work, all at the same time. And it is useful to this day.

The way is clear. It is the exact opposite of austerity and the rule of greedy plutocrats. Time for work, intelligence and generosity.

Patrice Ayme’

QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT: Nature’s Faster Than Light Architecture

A drastically back-to-basic reasoning shows that the universe is held together and ordered by a Faster Than Light Interaction, QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. Nature is beautifully simple and clever.

(For those who spurn Physics, let me point out that Quantum Entanglement, being the Fundamental Process, occurs massively in the brain. Thus explaining the non-local nature of consciousness.)

***

The Universe is held together by an entangled, faster than light interaction. It is time to talk about it, instead of the (related) idiocy of the “multiverse”. OK, it is easier to talk idiotically than to talk smart.

Entanglement Propagates, Says the National Science Foundation (NSF)

I will present Entanglement in such a simple way, that nobody spoke of it that way before.

Suppose that out of an interaction, or system S, come two particles, and only two particles, X and Y. Suppose the energy of S is known, that position is the origin of the coordinates one is using, and that its momentum is zero.

By conservation of momentum, momentum of X is equal to minus momentum of Y.

In Classical Mechanics, knowing where X is tells us immediately where Y is.

One can say that the system made of X and Y is entangled. Call that CLASSICAL ENTANGLEMENT.

This is fully understood, and not surprising: even Newton would have understood it perfectly.

The same situation holds in Quantum Physics.

This is not surprising: Quantum Physics ought not to contradict Classical Mechanics, because the latter is fully demonstrated, at least for macroscopic objects X and Y. So why not for smaller ones?

So far, so good.

In Quantum Physics, Classical Entanglement gets a new name. It is called QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. It shows up as a “paradox”, the EPR.

That paradox makes the greatest physicists freak out, starting with Einstein, who called QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT “spooky action at a distance”.

Why are physicists so shocked that what happens in Classical Mechanics would also be true in Quantum Physics?

Some say John Bell, chief theorist at CERN, “solved” the EPR Paradox, in 1964. Not so. Bell, who unfortunately died of a heart attack at 64, showed that the problem was real.

So what’s the problem? We have to go back to what is the fundamental axiom of Quantum Physics (Note 1). Here it is:

De Broglie decreed in 1924 that all and any particle X of energy-momentum (E,p) is associated to a wave W. That wave W s uniquely defined by E and p. So one can symbolize this by: W(E,p).

W(E,p) determines in turn the behavior of X. In particular all its interactions.

De Broglie’s obscure reasoning seems to have been understood by (nearly) no one to this day. However it was checked right away for electrons, and De Broglie got the Nobel all for himself within three years of his thesis.

Most of basics Quantum Mechanics is in De Broglie’s insight. Not just the “Schrodinger” equation, but the Uncertainty Principle.

Why?

Take a “particle X”. Let’s try to find out where it is. Well, that means we will have to interact with it. Wait, if we interact, it is a wave W. How does one find the position of a wave? Well the answer is that one cannot: when one tries to corner a wave, it becomes vicious, as everybody familiar with the sea will testify. Thus to try to find the position of a particle X makes its wave develop great momentum.

A few years after De Broglie’s seminal work, Heisenberg explained that in detail in the particular case of trying to find where an electron is, by throwing a photon on it.

This consequence of De Broglie’s Wave Principle was well understood in several ways, and got to be known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

(Uncertainty of Position)(Uncertainty of Momentum) > (Planck Constant)

[Roughly.]

The Quantum Wave, and thus the Uncertainty, applies to any “particle” (it could be a truck).

It is crucial to understand what the Uncertainty Principle says. In light of all particles being waves (so to speak), the Uncertainty Principle says that, AT NO MOMENT DOES A PARTICLE HAVE, EVER, A PERFECTLY DEFINED MOMENTUM and POSITION.

It would contradict the “particle’s” wavy nature. It’s always this question of putting a wave into a box: you cannot reduce the box to a point. There are NO POINTS in physics.

Now we are set to understand why Quantum Entanglement created great anxiety. Let’s go back to our two entangled particles, X and Y, sole, albeit not lonely, daughters of system S. Suppose X and Y are a light year apart.

Measure the momentum of X, at universal time t (Relativity allows to do this, thanks to a process of slow synchronization of clocks described by Poincare’ and certified later by Einstein). The momentum of Y is equal and opposite.

But, wait, at same time t, the position of Y could be determined.

Thus the Uncertainty Principle would be violated at time t at Y: one could retrospectively fully determine Y’s momentum and position, and Y would have revealed itself to be, at that particular time t, a vulgar point-particle… As in Classical Mechanics. But there are no point-particles in Quantum Physics:  that is, no point in Nature, that’s the whole point!).

Contradiction.

(This contradiction is conventionally called the “EPR Paradox”; it probably ought to be called the De Broglie-Einstein-Popper Paradox, or, simply, the Non-Locality Paradox.)

This is the essence of why Quantum Entanglement makes physicists with brains freak out. I myself have thought of this problem, very hard, for decades. However, very early on, I found none of the solutions by the great names presented to be satisfactory. And so I developed my own. The more time passes, the more I believe in it.

A difficulty I had is my theory created lots of cosmic garbage, if true (;-)).

At this point, Albert Einstein and his sidekicks (one of them was just used to translate from Einstein’s German) wrote:

“We are thus forced to conclude that the quantum-mechanical description of physical reality given by wave functions is not complete.” [Einstein, A; B Podolsky; N Rosen (1935-05-15). “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?”. Physical Review 47 (10): 777–780.]

The EPR paper ends by saying:

“While we have thus shown that the wave function does not provide a complete description of the physical reality, we left open the question of whether or not such a description exists. We believe, however, that such a theory is possible.”

This is high lawyerese: even as vicious a critic as your humble servant cannot find anything wrong with this craftily composed conceptology.

Einstein had corresponded on the subject with the excellent philosopher Karl Popper earlier (and Popper found his own version of the EPR). This is no doubt while he was more circumspect that he had been before.

Let’s recapitulate the problem, my way.

After interacting, according to the WAVE PRINCIPLE, both widely separating particles X and Y share the SAME WAVE.

I talk, I talk, but this is what the equations that all physicists write say: SAME WAVE. They can write all the equations they want, I think about them.

That wave is non-local, and yes, it could be a light year across. Einstein had a problem with that? I don’t.

Those who cling to the past, tried everything to explain away the Non-Locality Paradox.

Einstein was a particular man, and the beginning of the EPR paper clearly shows he wants to cling back to particles, what I view as his error of 1905. Namely that particles are particles during fundamental processes (he got the Physics Nobel for it in 1922; however, as I will not get the Nobel, I am not afraid to declare the Nobel Committee in error; Einstein deserved several Nobels, yet he made a grievous error in 1905, which has led most physicists astray, to this day… hence the striking madness of the so-called “multiverse”).

The Bell Inequality (which Richard Feynman stole for himself!) conclusively demonstrated that experiments could be made to check whether the Quantum Non-Local effects would show up.

The experiments were conducted, and the Non-Local effects were found.

That they would not have been found would have shattered Quantum Physics completely. Indeed, all the modern formalism of Quantum Physics is about Non-Locality, right from the start.

So what is my vision of what is going on? Simple: when one determines, through an interaction I, the momentum of particle X, the wave made of X and Y, W(X,Y), so to speak, “collapses”, and transmits the fact of I to particle Y at faster than light speed TAU. (I have computed that TAU is more than 10^10 the speed of light, c; Chinese scientists have given a minimum value for TAU, 10^4 c)

Then Y reacts as if it had been touched. Because, well, it has been touched: amoebae-like, it may have extended a light year, or more.

Quantum Entanglement will turn into Einstein’s worst nightmare. Informed, and all around, quasi-instantaneously. Tell me, Albert, how does it feel to have thought for a while one had figured out the universe, and then, now, clearly, not at all?

(Why not? I did not stay stuck, as Einstein did, making metaphors from moving trains, clocks, etc; a first problem with clocks is that Quantum Physics does not treat time and space equivalently. Actually the whole Quantum conceptology is an offense to hard core Relativity.)

Faster than light entanglement is a new way to look at Nature. It will have consequences all over. Indeed particles bump into each other all the time, so they get entangled. This immediately implies that topology is important to classify, and uncover hundreds of states of matter that we did not suspect existed. None of this is idle: Entanglement  is central to Quantum Computing.

Entanglement’s consequences, from philosophy to technology, are going to dwarf all prior science.

Can we make predictions, from this spectacular, faster than light, new way to look at Nature?

Yes.

Dark Matter. [2]

Patrice Ayme’

***

[1]: That the De Broglie Principle, the Wave Principle implies Planck’s work is my idea, it’s not conventional Quantum as found in textbooks.

[2]: Interaction density depends upon matter density. I propose that Dark Matter is the remnants of waves that were too spread-out to be fully brought back by Quantum Wave Collapse. In low matter density, thus, will Dark Matter be generated. As observed.

MOST CRUEL COUNTRY?

To know the worth of a country, look at how it treats the most innocent, the children.

Obama just belatedly proposed to not expulse right away five million immigrants with children (out of at least 11 million illegal immigrants). However genuine the president’s emotions, this all swims in a sea of hypocrisy: why did the “Democrats” not act, when they controlled Congress, and the presidency, five years ago… As they had promised they would?

Worse: the measures proposed by Obama are only temporary. If (as is likely) the USA has, within two years, an entire “Republican” government, the ‘generous’ invitation of Obama to illegal immigrants to “come out of the shadows“, will backfire: once localized by authorities, illegals will be thrown out, more easily: a textbook case of bait and switch.

Even worse: the gigantic illegal immigration in the USA masks a state system of plutocratic exploitation of (workers and) children. It is deliberate.

Is Obama left wing? Not really. All he is proposing is to try to impose International Law for a few months, because such is his good pleasure, at this point. He just forgot to have a law passed when he had all the powers. Too busy golfing with his buddies. (I don’t golf, golfing is a pseudo-sport for conspiring pip-squeaks who love to replace wilderness by fertilized lawns.)

Deporting children born in the USA, or their parents, would be a violation of the Convention of the Rights of Children, an International Law in all countries, except… the USA.

Paul Krugman woke up to the issue in “Suffer Little Children”. Says Krugman:

“there are more than a million young people in this country who came — yes, illegally — as children and have lived here ever since. Second, there are large numbers of children who were born here — which makes them U.S. citizens, with all the same rights you and I have — but whose parents came illegally, and are legally subject to being deported.

What should we do about these people and their families? There are some forces in our political life who want us to bring out the iron fist — to seek out and deport young residents who weren’t born here but have never known another home, to seek out and deport the undocumented parents of American children and force those children either to go into exile or to fend for themselves.”

When I say Krugman woke up, I am generous. Like the New York Times, he writes as if he were unaware of the fact that only the USA, on the entire planet, violates the Rights of Children, as official government policy!

I sent a powerful comment, the New York Times naturally censored it (this way, if nothing else, they can steal the ideas therein!). It’s reproduced below, and having censored it, is testimony to the general hypocrisy, and that the New York Times is not just far right wing, but somewhat inclined to abuse children, as a matter of systematic thinking.

The USA, as a country, loves to give all sorts of lessons to the world. Those high moral principles are often self-dealing, but it requires some work to find how. For example, the actions of the USA to destroy the European imperial (“colonial”) system, starting in 1918, sounded lofty, but aimed at replacing European administration, by American plutocratic exploitation.

Similarly, the on-going crack-down on banks, by being more severe with overseas banks, aims to replace world banking by American banking. And the crack-down on tax evasion, by being squarely aimed at the middle class (FATCA), aims to impoverish said middle class, and condition it to live in a police state, while reinforcing the transfer of power from everybody, to the reigning plutocracy (something else Obamacare also achieves).

Loving children is natural, being essential to the species’ survival. Hating children, is artificial, perverted. We expect no less from plutocracy, the rule of demonism (demonism, the rule of all things demoniac, in other words, plutocracy, is my answer to Leibnitz’s theodicy).

Before I get into the comment censored by the NYT, let me answer those would suggest this is only a problem for the USA.

Not so.

Starting in 1918, the USA maneuvered efficiently to get in control of the world, helped in this by German racial fascism, British naivety, and an idiotic, if not outright treacherous French commander in chief in 1940.

The end result is that the USA controls the world. By this I do not mean just that Washington and Wall Street rule. Russia, under Yeltsin was mostly destroyed by the perverse, self-dealing advice given by top American Universities, including the University of Chicago (where Obama taught) and Harvard (where Obama was distinguished, in more ways than one).

A lot of this has to do with a vicious mood best cultivated by mistreating children.

Candidate SS officers burnished their mentality by piercing the eyes of kittens; that Americans tolerate not knowing too well that children working in the fields fill their vegetarian plates is akin to that. And now for hypocrisy supreme:

MY COMMENT ON CHILDREN; CENSORED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES:

In 1989, the Convention on the Rights of the Child was adopted by UN General Assembly. On September 2, 1990 it became international law. 194 countries signed and ratified it. With one notable exception: the USA has not ratified it. It is keeping company with Somalia, and South Sudan.

Both Somalia and South Sudan are wrecked by war. Is then the USA wrecked by war? War against civilization, maybe?

The Rights of Children include not executing children and not making children work. The USA violates both.

It is easy to blame the Democrats: after all, they were in control of Congress and Senate (with a super majority) when Obama became president. Too busy partying?

Another point is that this immigration which happened illegally obviously happen with the complicity of the state. Or more exactly, the complicity of the United States of America. Indeed, no other advanced country had such an enormous illegal immigration (not only in absolute numbers, but relative numbers).

It stretches the imagination beyond decency to pretend that what is, by far, the world’s greatest military power, was such a failure at defending its borders, without deliberately organizing said failure.

How is a failure to contain immigration carefully organized? By deliberately organizing weak controls and weak penalties (the same way Great Britain did it).

Why is a failure to contain immigration carefully organized? Because of a will-to-exploitation.

Interrogating agribusinesses’ owners is revealing: they needed, and need, the illegal workers. They are actually the ones employing the children, in total violation of International Law. Many are far right wing “Republicans”. They support illegal immigration, and have enough money to buy the authorities, including the politicians (who are themselves exploiters, so this is a peer to peer fraternity, exploiters to exploiters, playing kabuki theater).

This entire picture is a damning condemnation of the American system. Not just its famed “way of life”, exploiting right and left, but also its way of thinking, and even its emotional system.

Americans can go to Church all they want, and evoke god at every turn, but, by the measure that counts the most, their cruel country is the world’s ugliest.

Patrice Ayme’

Logos, Neurology, Stoicism, Christianity, Higher Morality

My statement:

“THE LOGOS IS MADE OF ELEMENTS OF BRAIN SIMPLIFIED”

Brought the observation: ”I’m afraid I can’t imagine what this means.” (Massimo from Scientia Salon.) Others have asked for more details. Here they are.

The statement was admittedly abstruse. It is supposed to mean that the Logos as speech is a representation of the Logos as more complex brain processes. (Here the word “representation” is used in the mathematical sense, more general version: this is a new example of philosophy using fresh mathematics!)

How does this representative mechanism can be suspected to work? (I already wrote this, but this version has more definition).

Stars Inside. By Varying Myelin, Oligodendrocytes Act As Meta Controllers (2014)

Suppose we have brain “elements” X, Y, Z (to simplify, say X, Y, Z are neurons, but they could be organs in the brain, like the amygdala, or the geometric structure of some neighborhood in the brain, whatever… yes, here “neighborhood” is used as in General Topology, another mathematical field).

Yes, “brain elements” is an allusion to “elements of reality” as in the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen paper on non-separability in Quantum Mechanics.

Then suppose we have the situation X > Y, and Y > Z.

X>Y means that the brain element X acts on the brain element Y. In the simplest case, “>” are axons. But the first “>” does not have to be of the same nature as the second “>”, which could be, say, some neurohormone or transmitter, such as Nitrous Oxide, or even a burst of oxygen and sugar in an area of the brain, thanks to some gateway neuron.

This innocent sounding remark allows to incorporate all three forms of the Logos defined by Aristotle. Aristotle distinguished the Logos-as-reasoning, from the Logos as Pathos, and the Logos as Ethos.

Pathos implies emotion, sensation… Ethos judgment on these.

The Logos done in my most general way incorporates all these, logic, pathos and ethos, because it allows for emotions: a relation between Y and Z can be through, or about, neurohormones or neurotransmitters.

Logos in that most general X>Y way even includes some forms of interactions we can’t even imagine, such as Quantum Effects… which show up in magnetic field vision in birds, whose simplest explanation is something having to do with spintronics, a type of Quantum Mechanics scientifically elucidated, but not yet incorporated in technological devices.

Then X>Z. Now there will be some meta-structure attached to all these relations between brain elements: I feel that the brain is all about different levels of “meta” piled upon each other. The structure of axons allow for this.

Namely if an axon (say) is active between Y and Z, another neuron, higher up in the meta-structure, can know about it (axons have varying level of myelin along themselves, and could be none; this differentiated activity of oligodendrocytes was observed in 2014).

The “meta” simplification works this way: whereas we started initially with three objects (X, Y, Z) and two relations (X>Y and Y>Z), that can be reduced two just two signals (X>Y and Y>Z) going to say, just one meta neuron.

Thus, aware of all these activations, higher meta neurons can then communicate the whole thing to the Broca or Wernicke speech area will convert all this in a speech.

Then we get something like : x>y & y>z & then x>z, where now “>” is just the verb “implies”, in plain speech, or a hand gesture. Thus a potentially very complex and variegated Brain-Logos activity has been simplified into Speech-Logos as usually interpreted.

WHY & HOW A GOOD TALK CAN SAVE THE WORLD:

Speaking of my preceding essay, and my observation that Christianity had to make the Logos into god, Massimo observed that: “The Stoics were talking about Logos / Nature / God / Zeus well before Christianity.” Indeed, pretty much something the imperial cooks of Christianity had to do . Christianity is a vast salad, artfully mixed with plenty of goodies.

Massimo also said: “The rest of your [essay] is interesting … but I fail to see what it has to do with Stoicism.”

It has to do with the Logos, recognizing its centrality in Stoicism. The best path to stoicism may be to talk calmly about a situation until it goes away. Talk it to death, so to speak.

Any short Logos, say 500 words, will miss many perspectives. But a good new perspective can pick in depth, where no pick has gone before.

Massimo opined that: “there is more value in Zeno and his followers than in Jesus”:

Indeed. Basically Jesus’ teeny-tiny Logos goes only that far.

Jesus is in love with one man, his dad. He also loves love. Nice, but such a ridiculously short a Logos can’t fill an entire universe. We need a bigger boat to handle that enormous ocean, and its giant sharks.

By making the Logos into God, one can talk like Jesus, love mummy, and daddy, and love itself, but also say much, much more, thus become like Jesus’ own dad.

There is indeed more value in all-encompassing complexity… As long as one is not a person with feeble mental capabilities. Persons who are not smart at all are better served with just a few instructions, the way Jesus had it (if one just picks the crème de la crème of what Jesus said, and not the mud of his mud). People at large are also best served if those who are rather stupid love their dad, and love. And stick with this, not trying to go beyond.

Christianity is a religion for the herd (consult Nietzsche for more on this, including sexual interpretations of the cross). Masters used something more robust (Nietzsche again, following meekly the more exuberant Marquis de Sade). Roman generals, under the Republic, before the Greek Stoics became prominent, were masters of stoicism. Stoicism on the largest scale is pretty much how the Roman Republic grew.

The Republic went down when too many in the Roman elite quit Stoicism for Greed (thus bringing along Plutocracy). It was sadly pathetic. Without forbearance, no exuberance!

Patrice Ayme’

Not To Corral Islam Is Racist & Exploitative

Abstract: Both the present Middle East and the way one interacts with Islam it are failures that grew from a racist bias. Islam has not been treated as well as Christianity. Christianity was domesticated, educated, and given strict guidelines to become compatible with civilization. As a result, at least in Europe, after a joint attempt with the Nazis at killing most Jews, Christianity has been made irrelevant, except for the pretty monuments it left behind, a propensity to charity, and a consolation for some of us who believe we are more than star dust.

It is racist not to extend the same courtesy to Islam.

Universities Grew From Cathedral, Under Government Forcing

***

Two Frenchman were immediately identified from a Daesh (“Islamist State”; ISIS/ ISIL) video showing the beheading of 18 prisoners, November 17, 2014.

One of them is Maxime Hauchard from a French family of French descend. He got a Catholic education. After a few lousy little jobs, Maxime converted to Islam, starting to wear a robe and shaggy beard.

The other terrorist is pretty similar: same age, 22 years old, also converted out of the blue from a Catholic background.

A prominent, even dominant movement of Catholics, in the Middle-Ages and Renaissance, over a period of seven centuries, caused great mayhem in Europe, and the Middle East, killing millions, spawning dozens of wars.

Fortunately, nowadays, the Christian superstition has been nearly exterminated as a force in Europe. So it is only natural that those who want mayhem should turn towards its untamed daughter superstition, Sunni Islam, especially in its Wahabbist variant.

So back to our frustrated Catholic know-nothing, do-nothing Maxime. Let me recognize, at the outset, that the state, and the philosophy which guided it is at fault, and at fault in two ways: with neither providing jobs, nor the education to go with it. A better look at contemporary China, or the European past, is in order here.

So a French low life is told about the Qur’an where it is said that one should kill the enemies of the Faith (sometimes rather painfully). Not to be able to kill one’s enemies with Catholicism is obviously frustrating. Christ made some statements where he apparently said he wanted to kill the enemies of the Faith, but modern Catholics insist he did not mean it.

In the Qur’an, some verses suggest one should not force Islam upon non-believers. But there are three sorts of “non-believers”.

One can be a “non-believer”, but still from the “people of the Book” (whatever the book is!). Or one could be a total heathen, a polytheist (but sometimes Christians, because of the Trinity, three gods, are put in that category). And the worst type of “non-believer” are the “Apostates”.

“Apostates” used to be Muslim, but then they were found not to be Muslim, after all. Those have to be killed absolutely, the greatest severity has to be deployed against them.

That’s why, when a Muslim writer has a sudden need to expose shortcomings of Islam, they end up dead, or on the run.

Who decides who is an “Apostate”? Well, that’s the beauty of Islam: just join, and then you can.

Take the case of these French punks. Remember: they are plain French punks to start with, and cannot do a thing. They have no power. Everything is forbidden. Then they convert to Islam, something that takes two minutes. Then the punks are free to decide who is a Muslim, and who is an ex-Muslim, that is an Apostate. So they take a ticket to Turkey, Turkey let them get in contact with very well financed terrorists, and let them enter Syria. Once inside Syria, our ex-Catholics and Two Minutes Muslims are free to kill whoever they are told is Apostate. Hey, they can nominate their own apostate, like all these Syrians and Americans to behead.

If one is a born beheader, it’s wonderful.

Girls? Girls are hard to get for Catholic punks. Yet, as a Muslim, you will be able to acquire a “battlefield bride”, any female human “whom you right hand posses”. Yes, that’s in the Qur’an, the perfect excuse for those who want to violate Human Rights and the Geneva Convention.

The Quran, chapter 4 (An-Nisa), verse 24:

“ 1.And (also forbidden are) all married women except those whom your right hands possess (this is) Allah’s ordinance to you,

2.and lawful for you are (all women) besides those, provided that you seek (them) with your property, taking (them) in marriage not committing fornication… surely Allah is Knowing, Wise.

— translated by M. H. Shakir

The term “those whom your right hands possess” is considered to refer to prisoners of war, or more broadly to slaves in general, according to the classic tafsirs. Bernard Lewis proposes the translation “those whom you own.” Slaves are mentioned in at least twenty-nine verses of the Qur’an.

The general term ma malakat aymanukum (literally “what your right hands possess“) appears fourteen times in the Qur’an.

In all civilized countries, education is mandatory and this means not just that children ought to go to school, but that they ought to learn enough secular material to be civilizationally compatible.

This element of civilized behavior was first implemented by the Franks in the Sixth Century. Frankish bishops were often Frankish nobles made into bishops with a three weeks course. The Vatican hated them. A confrontation finally happened when the Pope Gregory the Great threatened to burn alive the bishop of Dignes, France. The latter was culprit of secularly educating children in his diocese.

Of course, the Pope had no army. The Frankish State told the bishop not to worry. Two centuries later, the Imperium Francorum actually forced all and any religious establishment to teach secularly, or be eradicated. By then the Pope had figured out not to argue with the Franks. The Church submitted.

Out of that mandatory secular education grew the European university system (the “Cathedral schools” became universities, as happened in Paris even before the present Cathedral.

In general, nasty religions have to be subdued, or stamped out. Such is the way of civilization. Leaving People in a state of subjection to nasty systems of superstition is human right abuse.

Tolerating vicious systems to thought and moods is not just about letting other been victimized. It’s also about civilization not been under threat.

Take the example of North Korea. A committee of the United Nations found that North Korea was a Nazi-like state, and recommended sanctions. (That, of course delighted Putin.) North Korea, being a nuclear armed state, represents an immense danger: it could bring the death of 50 million people, much faster than Hitler.

Civilization needs to be defended, lest it be destroyed.

What to do?

Nowadays, the Christian Church cannot do what it wants. If the Church hierarchy decided to burn alive some Church authority, as it did with Hus in the Fifteenth Century, the Carabinieri would take over the Vatican, disarm the Swiss Guard, and sent the Pope and his accomplices to a mental asylum, for treatment. (I would enjoy the sight, but that’s besides the point.)

The Vatican, as a State, was created by Charlemagne. What was the fundamentally Pagan Charlemagne up to, is an interesting question. He may have created the Vatican as a state to allow Venice, say, to pursue its semi-autonomous existence as a Republic (and thus allowing the potential for more Republics (Genova, Firenze), and attempts to establish some (as happened in Rome herself in the 11C). Within two centuries, a Muslim army actually seized the Vatican, and was then dislodge by a Frankish army.

If Christianity is tightly corralled, why should not Islam be tightly corralled too?

That question was not answered by the Franks, and their successors the French. In the case of the Franks, the reason is simple: the Franks were essentially secular (although their leaders evoked their made-up Christian Saints and Jesus, when not King David or the Trojans, all day long). Frankish armies annihilated the main Muslim Arab and Berber armies in 721-750 CE.

As the Franks extended religious tolerance to Jews, Pagans, and Catholics, they may as well have extended it to Muslims, too. And that’s what they did. Thus, no Muslim was discriminated against (massacres against the Jews started, much later, in Germany with the First Crusade, in 1099 CE).

That worked well. So it became a habit. When the Franks and Normands took over parts of Italy and Sicily which had been invaded by Muslims, that policy of religious tolerance was pursued: Crusaders were astounded to see thousands of Muslims praying in their peculiar way on what was nominally Roman ground (although the Arabs called the Franks “Franji”, namely Franks, the Franks considered themselves “Romans” officially since 800 CE).

Emperor Frederik Barbarossa’s personal guard was Muslim.

Meanwhile, the French State had, de facto, split from the rest of the Roman empire, although it was considered that the “French king was emperor in his own kingdom”. Western Francia was the strongest piece of said empire, and kept seeing the Church as something submitted to it. Clashes between the French State and the Vatican were numerous.

Some of these clashes were funny: a French king was excommunicated for 12 years (he had divorced his Danish wife, and remarried, without the Pope’s approval). Others were less amusing: Philippe IV Le Bel, cracked down on the Vatican, arrested the Pope, who ended dead. Soon, Philippe arrested, and annihilated the army of the Church, the Templar Monks.

For centuries to come, the French State went back and forth, most of the times cracking down on the Church. However three spectacular counter-reactions occurred, at the times of the seven religious wars of the late 16C, under the Medici queen, or, of course, under the usual suspects, Louis XIV and the Slave Master Napoleon.

In the end, the French State made a tight deal with the Catholics, Protestants and Jews… But not the Muslims! (Although it had plenty of Muslims, more or less under its jurisdiction in Algeria; I say more or less, because a deal had been made about the freedom of religion with Abd El Kader, to end the war in Algeria).

In all these matters, the rest of Europe more or less followed France, however belatedly (for example the Prussian anti-Jewish laws re-instituted all over in 1815, were finally destroyed in 1945).

France herself has been following her philosophers… Who were clueless about Islam.

The last philosopher to dare criticize Islam was Voltaire, and his theater on the subject was censored recently… Although it was not censored under the Ancient Regime! And although, in the guise of criticizing Muhammad, Voltaire was criticizing Christianity, as everybody knew.

So one can say that now Islam has become more of a sacred cow in Europe, than Christianity was in 1770 CE!

Why is Islam treated more leniently in 2014 than Christianity in 1770? Well, it’s a case of reverse racism. But reverse racism is still racism, just like antimatter is still matter of sorts.

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

 

a transexual look fashionable in Europe, sometimes with high heels and feminine manners, see Wurst; amusingly we have a rant from Charlemagne himself on the subject: the emperor declared that only short skirts, or long pants made sense for real men, as anything else got in the way).