Poetic Philosophy Defended

… Against Analytic Philosophy:

Philosophy is the love of wisdom. Either learned, or applied. One would be naïve to believe that it emerges, at the most crucial points, in an “analytic” way. That error is all too common in the Anglosphere, and this is why most English speaking philosophers tend to be mostly famous because they repeat, rather poorly some ideas they picked up on the continent.

(The mediocrity of English speaking philosophers is directly related to the stronger plutocracy of the Anglosphere. Locke was a slave master, Hobbes repeated the Romans, Smith parroted the French physiocrats, etc. The mediocrity has labelled itself “analytic” philosophy… As if there were philosophers who were not “analytic”…)

The most innovative philosophers used poetry. They had to.

Not Just a Poet. Also A Breakthrough Philosopher, From Love To Hell

Gotlob Frege founded analytic philosophy. However his system contained a contradiction, as Bertrand Russell informed him. He corrected that with an even worse mistake.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/30/neurons-axons-axioms/

Analysis is not easy. Too much depends upon too little. It is a form of intellectual fascism: useful sometimes, dangerous always.

Nietzsche knew this, and he smartly abandoned the idea of making a system. Instead he did what one should call “local philosophy”: take an issue, and fire a few wisdom torpedoes.

Nietzsche used poetry. Most philosophers had to use poetry. Those who were too serious all the time end down in the abyss, with Kant, supporting authorities and thus, as Kant did, the slave trade, or the contemporaneous equivalent of it.

What is poetry?

It is the technique of imparting mental images, by appealing to emotions, evocations, half concocted logical assemblages.

This is always how new thinking starts: fuzzy, in pieces, a will to an evocation. Certainly wisdom is part of thinking.

Rabelais explained, five centuries ago, that the thinking of We the People was quite different from the official, hyper-religious one. Rabelais explained that, to help both thinking, per se, and the thinking of We The People, one should speak plainly and also explore, delve, and blossom in the sort of preoccupations, and appeals to the fantastic, that appealed to the People.

Dante had done this two centuries earlier. He was a very serious person: see his representation above, a statue in Firenze. He got exiled from his birthplace, Florence, in reward for thinking correctly about many things (and being one of the leaders of the moderate party).

When il Sommo Poeta (“the Supreme Poet”) put various celebrities, including a pope, in various circles of hell, he was making certainly an impression on wisdom. Why not a Pope in hell, indeed? Is it not what the Cathars had spoken about, earlier?

Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also called “the three fountains” and “the three crowns”. Fountains and crowns of wisdom.

Petrach climbed Mont Ventoux in Provence (at the time, a very rare exploit), a few years after Buridan did it (showing that influences were circulating).

Rabelais’ point was that the official philosophy, the Catholic religion, was not believed by We The People, who was much more secular, pragmatic, and aware that the dumbed down official philosophy, aka the Catholic Religion, was just an instrument of oppression. So he wrote fantastic tales, which positively enraged the doctors of theology at the Sorbonne (the University). In the end, three philosophers associated to Rabelais were burned alive. Rabelais, a very popular writer, who also a lawyer, a cleric, and a famous professor of medicine, could not be touched.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/12/god-here-dog-there/

Mentalities come from systems of thoughts entangled with systems of emotions. A wise mentality has to be wise in both ways. The emotional calculus is less precise than a digital logos, but it is even more powerful, because it is the one which e-motes the other (makes it move).

We cannot think well, if we do not emote well.

A fortiori for wisdom, which is superior thinking, where thinking is unclear.

Sometimes, to improve thinking, one has to quit official thinking. One has to change many things, from causality, to semantics. If one sticks faithfully to official semantics, causality, and “facts”, and one abandons poetry, one is implicitly sticking to established philosophy. One is just a parrot. Parrots are rarely contributing to philosophy.

Patrice Ayme’

Neurons, Axons, Axioms

(Second Part of “Causality Explained”)

Axiomatic Systems Are Fragile:

Frege was one of the founders of mathematical logic and analytic philosophy. Frege wrote the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik [Basic Laws of Arithmetic], in three volumes. He published the first volume in 1894 (paying for it himself). Just before the second volume was going to press, in 1903, a young Bertrand Russell informed Frege of a dangerous contradiction, Russell’s paradox (a variant of the Cretan Liar Paradox). Frege was thrown in total confusion: a remedy he tried to apply reduced the number of objects his system could be applied to, to just ONE. Oops.

Frege was no dummy: he invented quantifiers (Second Order Logic, crucial to all of mathematics). It is just that logic can be pitiless.

If Those Neurons Evolved Independently From Ours, Neurons Solve Thinking

Neurons are (part of) the solution to the problem of thinking, a problem so deep, we cannot conceive of it. A second independent evolution of neuronicity would certainly prove that.

Truer Axiomatics Is Simpler, More Powerful:

Russell and Whitehead, colossal mathematicians and philosophers, decided to demonstrate 1 + 1 = 2. Without making “Cretan Liar” self-contradictions.

They wrote a book to do so. In the second volume, around page 200, they succeeded.

I prefer simpler axioms to get to 1 + 1 =2.

(Just define the right hand side with the left.)

It would be interesting that philsophers define what “causing” means, and what “causality” is, for us. Say with explicit examples.

I want to know what cause causes. It’s a bit like pondering what is is.

Some creatures paid as philosophers by employers know 17th century physics, something about billiards balls taught in first year undergraduate physics. (I know it well, I have taught it more than once.) Then they think they know science. All they know is Middle-Ages physics.

These first year undergraduates then to explain the entire world with the nail and hammer they know so well.

They never made it to Statistical Mechanics, Thermodynamics, etc. And the associated “Causality” of these realms of knowledge.

***

Axiomatics Of Causality With The Quantum:

How does “causality” work in the Quantum Mechanics we have?

You consider an experiment, analyze its eigenstates, set-up the corresponding Hilbert space, and then compute.

“Billiard Balls” is what seems to happen when the associated De Broglie wave has such high frequency that the eigenstates seem continuous.

So Classical Mechanical “causality” is an asymptote.

***

Know How To Dream… To Bring Up New Axiomatics

Human beings communicate digitally (words and their letters or ideograms), and through programs (aka languages, including logic and mathematics).

All of this used conventions, “rules”, truths I call axioms, to simplify… the language (this is not traditional, as many of these axioms have had names for 25 centuries).

So for example, I view the “modus ponens” (if P implies Q and P happens, then Q) as an axiom (instead of just a “logical form” or “rule of inference”).

The reason to call basic “logic forms” “axioms” is that they are more fragile than they look. One can do with, or without them. All sorts of non-classical logics do without the “excluded third law” (for example fuzzy set theory).

With such a semantic, one realizes that all great advances in understanding have to do with setting up more appropriate axioms.

***

Buridan’s Revolution, Or An Axiomatics Revolution:

In the Fourteenth Century, the intellectual movement launched by Buridan, included Oresme and the Oxford Calculators. They discovered inertia, momentum (“impetus”), graphs, the law of falling bodies, the heliocentric system (undistinguishable from the geocentric system, said Buridan, but we may as well stick to the latter, as it is in Scripture, said Buridan, wryly).

Buridan’s revolution is little known. But was no accident: Buridan refused to become a theologian, he stuck to the faculty of arts (so Buridan did not have to waste time in sterile debates with god cretins… differently from nearly all intellectuals of the time). Much of Buridan is still in untranslated Medieval Latin, that may explain it, after centuries of Catholic war against him.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Jean_Buridan.aspx

These breakthroughs were major, and consisted in a number of new axioms (now often attributed to Galileo, Descartes, Newton). The axioms had a tremendous psychological effect. At the time, Buridan, adviser to no less than four Kings, head of the University of Paris, was untouchable.

The philosopher cum mathematician, physicist and politician, died in 1360. In 1473, the pope and king Louis XI conspired to try to stop the blossoming Renaissance.

More than a century after his death, Buridan’s works, his new axioms, were made unlawful to read. (However Buridan was mandatory reading in Cracow, and Copernic re-published the work, as soon as he was safely ensconced within the safety of his death bed).

The mind, the brain, is quite fuzzy (in the sense of fuzzy set theory; the dreaming part; think of dendrites, prominences within synapses, starfish-like astrocytes, neurotransmitters, etc.). Axioms, and axons enable to code it digitally. So mathematization, and programmation are intrinsic human mental activities.

***

We Are All Theoretical Scientists Of The Mathematical Type:

Human beings continually draw consequences from the axioms they have, through the intermediary of giant systems of thought, and systems of mood (mentality for short).

When reality comes to drastically contradict expected consequences, mentality is modified, typically in the easiest way, with what I call an ANTI-IDEA.

For example when a number of physics Nobel laureates (Lenard, Stark) were anxious to rise in the Nazi Party, they had to reconcile the supposed inferiority of the Jews with the fact that Einstein was a Jew. They could not admit either that Poincare’ invented Relativity, as he was also of the most hated nation (and of the most anti-German fascism family in France!).

So they simply claimed that it was all “Jewish Science” (this way they did not have to wax lyrically about why they had collaborated with Einstein before anti-Judaism).

When brute force anti-ideas don’t work after all (as became clear to Germans in 1945), then a full re-organization of the axiomatics is in order.

An example, as I said, is fuzzy set theory. It violates the Excluded-Third Law.

But sometimes the reconsideration may be temporary. (Whether A and Non-A holds in the LOGIC of Quantum Mechanics, the Einstein-Schrodinger Cat, is a matter of heated debate.)

***

 Quantum Logic:,Both In & Out Of This World:

The removal of old logical axioms can be definitive. For example the Distributive Law of Propositional Calculus fails in Quantum Logic. That has to do with the Uncertainty Principle, a wave effect that would be etched in stone, were it not even more fundamental.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic

***

Verdict? Neurons, Axons, And Axioms Make One System:

We have been playing with axioms for millions of years: they reflect the hierarchical, axon dominated, neuron originated most basic structure of the nervous system.

Why?

Well, the neuronal-axonal skeleton of minds is probably the lowest energy solution to the problem of thinking in the appropriate space. It has just been proposed neurons evolved twice:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150325-did-neurons-evolve-twice/

We do not just think axiomatically, but we certainly communicate axiomatically, even with ourselves. And the axiomatics are dynamical. Thus causes learn to fit effects.

The fact this work is subjective, in part, does not mean it does not have to do with nature. Just the opposite: causality is nature answering the call of nature, with a flourish.

Human mentality is a continual dialogue between nature inside (Claude Bernard) and nature outside.

Changing axioms is hard work: it involves brain re-wiring. Not just connecting different neurons, but also probably modifying them inside.

Mathematicians have plenty of occasions to ponder what a proof (thus an explanation) is. The situation is worse than ever, with immense proofs only the author gets (Fermat’s Last Theorem was just an appetizer), or then computer-assisted proofs (nobody can check what happened, and it’s going to get worse with full Quantum Computers).

Not all and any reasoning is made to be understood by everybody. (Mathematicians have to use alien math they don’t really understand, quite often.)

Yes, thinking is hard. And not always nice. But somebody has to do it. Just remember this essence, when trying to communicate with the stars: hard, and not always nice.

Patrice Ayme’

Causality Explained

WHAT CAUSES CAUSE?

What Is Causality? What is an Explanation?

Pondering the nature of the concept of explanation is the first step in thinking. So you may say that there is nothing more important, nothing more human.

I have a solution. It is simplicity itself. I go for the obvious model:

Mathematics, logic, physics, and the rest of science give a strict definition of what causality, and an explanation is.

How?

Through systems of axioms and theorems.

Some of the sub-systems therein have to do with logic (“Predicate Calculus”). They are found all over science and common sense (although they will not be necessarily present in systems of thought such as, say, poetry, or rhetoric).

WHEN A IMPLIES B, IN A LOGOS, ONE OUGHT TO SAY THAT A “CAUSES” B.

A and B are propositions. They do not have to be very precise.

Precision Is Not Necessarily The Smartest. Semantic Web Necessary.

As it turns out, except in Classical Computer Science as it exists today (Classical CS by opposition to Quantum CS, a subject developing in the last 20 years), propositions are never precise (so a degree of poetry is everywhere, even in mathematics!) Propositions, in practice, depend upon a semantic web.

A could be: “Plate Tectonic” and B could be “Continental Drift”. That A causes B is one of axioms of present day geophysics.

Thus I define causality as logical implication.

To use David Hume’s example: flame F brings heat H, always, and so is supposed to cause it: F implies H. Hume deduced causality from observation of the link (if…then).

More detailed modern physics shows that the heat of flame F is agitation that can be transmitted (both a theorem about, and a definition of, heat). Now we have a full, detailed logos about F and what H means, and how F implies H, down to electronic orbitals.

Mathematicians are used to make elaborate demonstrations, and then, to their horror, discover somewhere something that cannot be causally justified. Then they have to reconsider from scratch.

Mathematics is all about causality.

“Causes” in mathematics are also called axioms. In practice, well known theorems are used as axioms to implement further mathematical causality. A mathematician using a theorem from a distant field may not be aware of all the subtleties that allow to prove it: he would use distant theorems he does no know the proof of, as axioms. Some mathematician’s, or logician’s axiom is another’s theorem.

(Hence some hostility between mathematicians and logicians, as much of what the former use the latter proved, but the former have no idea how!)

Causality, by the way, reflects the axonal geometry of the brain.

The full logic of the brain is much more complicated than mathematics, let alone Classical Computer Science, have it. Indeed, brain logic involves much more than axons, such as dendrites, neurotransmitters, glial cells, etc. And of these, only axonal geometry is simple enough to be approximated by classical logic… In first order.

Mathematics is causation. And the ultimate explanation. Mathematics makes causation as limpid we can have it.

This theory met with the approval of Philip Thrift (March 27, 2015): “I agree exactly with the words Patrice Ayme wrote — but with “mathematics”→”programming”, “mathematical”→”programmatical”, etc.”

I pointed out later to Philip that Classical Programming was insufficient to embrace full human (and quantum!) logic. He agreed.

However the preceding somehow made Massimo P , a professional philosopher, uneasy. He quoted me:

“Patrice: “To claim that mathematics is not causal is beyond belief. Mathematics is all about causality.”

Massimo: It most obviously isn’t. What’s causal about Fermat’s Last Theorem? Causality implies physicality, and most of pure math has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with physicality.

Patrice: “Causes” in mathematics are also called axioms.”

Massimo: “You either don’t understand what causality means or what axioms are. Or both.”

Well, once he had released his emotional steam, Massimo, a self-declared specialist of “physicality” [sic] did not offer one iota of logic in support of his wished-for demolition of my… logic. I must admit my simple thesis is not (yet) in textbooks…

Insults are fundamentally poetic, illogical, or pre-logical. Massimo is saying that been totally confused about causality and explanations is a sacred cow of a whole class of philosophers (to whom he had decided he belongs). Being confused about causality started way back.

“All philosophers, “said Bertrand Russell,” imagine that causation is one of the fundamental axioms of science, yet oddly enough, in advanced sciences, the word ’cause’ never occurs … The law of causality, I believe, is a relic of bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm …”

Russell was as wrong as wrong could be (not about the monarchy, but about “causation”). He wrote the preceding in 1913, when Relativity was well implanted, and he, like many others, was no doubt unnerved by it.

Poincare’ noticed, while founding officially “Relativity” in 1904, that apparent succession of events was not absolute (but depended upon relative motions).

Indeed.

But, temporal succession is only an indication of possible causality. In truth causality exists, if, and only if, a logical system establishes it (moreover, said logic has to be “true”; that, assigning a truth value, is, by itself is a separate question that great logicians have studied without clear conclusions).

When an explanation can be fully mathematized, it is finished. Far from being “abstract”, it has become trivial, or so suppose those with minds for whom mathematics is obvious.

Mathematics is just like 2 + 2 = 4, written very large.

Fermat’s Last Theorem is not different in nature, from 2 + 2 = 4… (But for something very subtle: semantic drift, and a forest of theorems used as axioms to go from side of Fermat’s theorem to the other.)

To brandish mathematics as unfathomable “abstract” sorcery, as was done in Scientia Salon, is a strange, but not new, streak.

There in “Abstract Explanations In Science” Massimo and another employed philosopher pondered “whether, and in what sense, mathematical explanations are different from causal / empirical ones.”

My answer is that mathematical, and, more generally logical, explanations are the model of all explanations. We speak (logos) and thus we communicate our thoughts. Even to ourselves.

The difference between mathematics and logic? Mathematics is more poetical. For example, Category Theory is not anchored in logic, nor anywhere else. It is hanging out there, beautiful and useful, a castle in the sky, just like all and any poem.

Such ought to be the set-up on the nature of what causality could be, to figure out what causality is in the physical world. Considering that Quantum Entanglement is all over nature, this is not going to be easy (and it may contain a hidden clock).

Patrice Ayme’

Who IS, What IS, EVIL?

EVIL IS, WHAT EVIL HIDES:

There is no more important question than the nature of Evil. What it consists in. Let alone where it hides. Upon the definition of Evil given by civilization, depends the survival of advanced intelligence on this planet.

We have ever more power. We need ever more intelligence to manage it. We need an ever stricter morality, to motivate said intelligence.

As we will see by the end of this essay, enormous evil (starving all of humanity to increase the evil gains of those who lead us) is already in place. It’s not just my (long held) opinion. Science magazine even agrees.

To motivate ever stricter mentality, we learn to become ferocious. This is a long held truth, not just of Islam and Christianity, but also Buddhism:

Exterminator Of Evil, Tenkeisei. Obviously Such Hard Work, It Requires A Demon

I scoff when I see German TV making fuzzy the face of the mass criminal who just killed 149 people. What? To protect his privacy? The privacy of evil? Oh, some will say, to protect those who were close to him. Well, are they not co-culprit? From the village where the co-pilot was, he was well known to nuts. People knowing that ought to have contacted Lufthansa, or the authorities.

Evil is all too private.

Let’s make it public.

Some have said, the mass murder by a (implicitly well educated, disciplined) German was unlikely. But Nazi was, mostly, an enormous mass murder-suicide. It differed only in scale.

Fifty years ago, intellectuals worried about nuclear war. On the face of it, it was a strange worry: the USSR and the USA were fighting for world supremacy. Their elites wanted to control the planet, they were overstretched in all ways.

The USSR crashed and burned, Putin is trying to revive the ambers.

Now people have forgotten about nuclear weapons. But they are here, more than ever. Why did they forget? Because the world has become morally asleep. And why that? Because much greater danger are not just looming, but exerting their grip. Reality has become an inconvenient distraction on the way to lucidity.

***

NUCLEAR WAR IS EVER MORE LIKELY:

The situation is worse now: it is easier than ever to make nuclear weapons. It is not just a question of ever more efficient ultracentrifuges in underground fortresses. There are now even more advanced methods, using lasers, to separate Uranium isotopes. The USA itself is starting to use lasers to separate the highly explosive U235.

France and the USA are the two countries in the West which make thermonuclear weapons (Britain just buys them from the USA, and Israel got the technology from France). France and the USA have not made a technological breakthrough that would allow to neutralize nukes.

Say death rays of some sort; although France and the USA dominate in high power, military grade laser technology, said laser tech has not got to the point it could shoot down 99.99% of incoming missiles; actually it could not shoot down one.)

So, at this point, from lack of technological progress, nuclear weapons are still the ultimate weapon. And they are getting ever easier to make.

What does that mean for the talks with Iran? Well, that it is the occasion to refine an intrusive regime of nuclear inspections, to be used as a paradigm with other nations.

And what of Obama’s naive will, initially, to do away with nuclear weapons (thus affording a pretext to give him a Nobel)?

Well, as the world is, the safest way to prevent nuclear war is to augment the military research budgets of the West (only Israel has been doing well that way, devising plenty of anti-ballistic missile systems, with USA help…) Yes, I know, it’s cynical. But flowers won’t work.

***

EVIL HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:

Usually I roll out the usual suspect, Abrahamic entities. Here now, we have a 27 pilot. He wants to become captain. But he knows his sick mind will not allow it. So he let go with the very depth of the human Dark Side: he brings another 149 innocent people, including babies with himself. The Will To Extermination.

Hitler was just the same.

When the war was clearly lost, the Nazis kept on fighting. At this point many average Germans who previously supported Nazism turned against it: why could not the Nazis give up, as even the Kaiser had, in World War One? Because of the Will to Extermination. The extermination of whom they wanted to exterminate was the Nazis’ main industry in their last few months. If they did not know it before, now the Germans could clearly see that the Will to Extermination was the Nazis’ main motivation. That maybe why the day it surrendered, Germans never supported Nazism again (in most ways; and differently from Japan, where the population never saw their imperial forces in full extermination mode: that happened on the national territory, only in Okinawa, a smallish, distant island).

***

WHEN IS EVIL HIDING? EVIL HIDES ALL THE TIME

The Greeks knew that Pluto could make itself invisible. The evil co-pilot hid his madness from his employer, just as he hid from his employer that he was under doctor’s order to stop working.

Pilots ought to be required to make their health physical and mental PUBLIC property. That ought to be true even for those piloting a car for Uber. If they don’t like it, they can do something else.

To be able to kill people en masse ought to be viewed as a privilege given by the masses to a few, in counterpart of what, they keep an eye on these few, at all and any moment.

Hitler claimed he was out to help oppressed minorities, oppressed workers, and make Germany proud, great. He claimed to be against “plutocrats” (his word!) In truth his real aims were not this, and he knew all too well that he brandished the red of revolution (Soviet style), when actually he was sponsored by plutocrats. And, while he claimed to be a nationalist, he was blatantly and gigantically supported by American plutocrats such as Henry Ford.

Nowadays, Pluto is hiding better than ever.

The world’s richest man, and arguably greatest monopolist, instead of being in jail, has self-defined as the greatest philanthropist, and now directs health research worldwide in the coffers of what he, his family and associates have invested in. All of this tax free, of course.

You want another example of spectacular evil? What about starving people to make corporations and their plutocrats even richer?

***

DO BIOFUEL POLICIES SEEK TO CUT EMISSIONS BY CUTTING FOOD? YES!

A study published yesterday, March 27, 2015, in the journal Science found that government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings.

How much more evil can one get?

Shrinking the amount of food that people and livestock eat decreases the amount of carbon dioxide that they breathe out or excrete as waste. The reduction in food available for consumption, rather than any inherent fuel efficiency, drives the decline in carbon dioxide emissions in government models, the researchers found.

(Indeed, it’s know that “biofuels” are very inefficient. Making ethanol from corn or wheat requires energy that is mostly derived from traditional greenhouse gas-emitting sources, such as coal, natural gas. But then it benefits companies such as Monsanto, which make the Genetically Engineered corn in which Bill Gates is invested!)

“Without reduced food consumption, each of the models would estimate that biofuels generate more emissions than gasoline,” said Timothy Searchinger, first author on the paper and a research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy.

Searchinger’s co-authors were Robert Edwards and Declan Mulligan of the Joint Research Center at the European Commission; Ralph Heimlich of the consulting practice Agricultural Conservation Economics; and Richard Plevin of the University of California-Davis.

The study looked at three models used by U.S. and European agencies, and found that all three estimate that some of the crops diverted from food to biofuels are not replaced by planting crops elsewhere. About 20 percent to 50 percent of the net calories diverted to make ethanol are not replaced through the planting of additional crops, the study found.

The result is that less food is available, and, according to the study, these missing calories are not simply extras enjoyed in resource-rich countries. Instead, when less food is available, prices go up.

“The impacts on food consumption result not from a tailored tax on excess consumption but from broad global price increases that will disproportionately affect some of the world’s poor,” Searchinger said.

The models used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board indicate that ethanol made from corn and wheat generates modestly fewer emissions than gasoline. The fact that these lowered emissions come from reductions in food production is buried in the methodology and not explicitly stated, the study found.

The European Commission’s model found an even greater reduction in emissions. It includes reductions in both quantity and overall food quality due to the replacement of oils and vegetables by corn and wheat, which are of lesser nutritional value.

“Without these reductions in food quantity and quality, the [European] model would estimate that wheat ethanol generates 46% higher emissions than gasoline and corn ethanol 68% higher emissions,” Searching said.

The Science paper recommends that modelers show their work more transparently so that policymakers can decide if they wish to seek greenhouse gas reductions from food reductions.

Actually “policymakers” is the concept that hide the truth. It is to We the People to decide whether we should starve so that plutocrats can jet around the world in their private jets, while plotting our fate, and future ill-gotten gains, and powers they attribute themselves ever more generously, while we are invited to partake in ever more austerity.

Plutocracy is not just an inconvenience. As its name indicates, it is the ultimate evil. And it hides. We have to make sure it does not become a fate. And that means, first, to roll it out of its hiding places, from the minds of co-pilots to haughty policies which are anything but.

We are not led by great leaders, intelligence and goodness. We have been led, astray, by viciousness and the basest instincts, all too much. Time to withdraw the respect, and change course. As Dominique Deux half-joked in a comment on this site, time to make an app where passengers will vote: “… automatic implementation of the majority vote.
They’ll never ever vote for doom.
Democracy wins again, and smartphones become useful.”

We are all passengers on this Earth. And any baby has more right to be, than Bill Gates. Or any of our other great leaders. And those who have already abused power massively (see the food for fuel policy above), ought to have less right to be in power than anybody else.

Patrice Ayme’

Searchinger, R. Edwards, D. Mulligan, R. Heimlich, and R. Plevin. Do biofuel policies seek to cut emissions by cutting food? Science 27 March 2015: 1420-1422. DOI: 10.1126/science.1261221.

 

Why People Like To Kill People; Consequences

There are many reasons why people like to kill people: greed, anxiety, misperceptions, pain etc., are common. Here I shall focus on a particular reason. A 27 year old German co-pilot locked himself in the cockpit, and while the captain pounded on the door, flew himself and another 149 persons, including tens of babies and children, into a cliff at the base of a mountain that towered another 1,500 meters higher.

Insanely enough, the murderous maniac may have view it as an act of love. Dying among those mountains he knew well, and loved. The area may be the most famous in the world for glider pilots: enormous mountains with a warm sun create tremendous updraft. The valleys are full of airports. Wingsuit flying was invented there.

Typical Valley of Hautes Alpes & Provence. Most Are Wild

This is not the first time a plane is crashed deliberately by a pilot. At least a dozen cases are known, or suspected, in the last few decades. Some of these planes carried more than 200 people.

Conventional humanism has no answer.

I do. And the consequences are not just vast, but ominous. They plead for direct democracy.

Some will say: ’Why to care about insane maniacs crashing planes? Stuff happens.’

Well, you know, we are living on a spaceship. Spaceship Earth. And, potentially, a handful of self-glorifying and glorified maniacs are in the cockpit. Think about it. I will show that, what looks like maniacal, and it is, such maniacal behavior is an all too normal part of human ethology.

We are all flying through space, we have forgotten it all too long.

Flying is the human metaphor.

Since Icarus, flying has been an obsession, and it is closely related, in the subconscious collective, with hubris going too far. “Air disasters” thus loom large.

But there is more. Human beings are technological, scientific beings. We can fly only because we have great mastery of technology. Science, technology are, to an ever greater extent a near-Faustian bargain; we get comfort, grow and multiply, and travel all over. In exchange, we destroy the biosphere.

A co-pilot of Egyptair succeeded to crash a jumbo jet into the ocean, while the captain was fighting next to him to pull up the plane, begging the “god is great” screaming insane maniac in the other seat to help him out.

Is it not our fate nowadays? Are we not all passengers on spaceship Earth, at the mercy of megalomaniacal, deluded maniacs in the cockpit?

So why all the murderous hatred from the maniacs?

Those who don’t believe in mass murderous insanity are invited to contemplate the lynching of a 27 year old Afghan woman. Allegedly for burning a book… Then she was burned herself, to a crisp. The accuser recognized later he made the book burning up. Oops. Back in New York, the Afghan president ironically pretended that Afghanistan would have a woman president before the USA. I guess it’s supposed to be all very funny.

For the lynching:

So why the hatred from the maniacs? Why so many maniacs?

Because human beings are all a bit prone to insanity, and murderous rage. No offense meant, just a crucial observation carried out. Yes, I am aware that woe is to be visited onto the one who calls attention to that scandal whose name is man.

And the craziness of man is not just a scandal: it demands to reorganize human society. A commenter on this site, Duviel, suggested that I played with fire. According to him, by being too critical with the present human society, I risked to turn the USA, or Europe, into Syria, Libya, or Afghanistan.

Thus he suggested that the collective mental state is so very fragile, than a few words would lead civilization to savagery. Why so fragile?

Human beings are born as babies who depend upon love for survival and creation of their minds. However, when full grown, human beings discover that the greatest danger to them is other men.

This has been like that for two million years, about 100,000 generations, plenty of time to anchor behavioral change genetically, and epigenetically.

So man is all about love, first, and then quite a bit about hatred to. How is the mix allocated? Well, one can just look at epigenetics: it is a control system that varies the activation, or des-activation of genes, according to circumstances.

A great progress in Evolution Theory in recent years is that one has demonstrated, theoretically, and experimentally, that genetic behavior, implementation and even inheritance depends, to sometimes a great extent, upon the environment. (Lamarck was right all along!)

One can only guess that it is the same for character and personalities themselves: they depend upon the environment. From full love to full hatred. In the case of fishes, the epigenetic transformation can change a female into a male, and then, maybe even a super-male.

What triggers this? A change in the environment. The absence of males.

It is the same in humans. For two million years, at least, having too many people around was a death sentence. For the species. So the species comes equipped with a meta-ecological control system; the WILL TO EXTERMINATION.

Nietzsche did not think of that one: he only spoke of the Will To Power.

De Sade, the “Divine Marquis” was sharper. De Sade, one of the engineers of the Revolution of 1789, found himself in a leadership position during the Revolution. He warned his colleagues not to try to expand the Revolution by force. He said it would backfire.

Why? Because De Sade knew well how the Dark Side of man worked: it is always looking for excuses to get rolling.

The WILL TO EXTERMINATION just finds excuses to get rolling.

In the case of this 27 year old pilot, whatever demons rambled in his head led him to deliberately lock that door, push the manual override to prevent its unlocking, remove the automatic pilot, set the Airbus on a descent, ignore all the calls from Air Traffic control, and other planes, the pounding on the door, and the ground proximity alarms. He suffered, and human ethology told him it was other people’s fault. They had to be exterminated.

This is not different from the Nazis’ main reasoning (I am not saying Nazism was in any sense conducive to this particular maniac’s behavior; there are hints that the mysterious disappearance of that Malaysian jumbo over the Indian airline was also a suicide: who set the Automatic Pilot to fly towards Antarctica?)

The Nazis (and most Germans, then) suffered, and they wanted to exterminate (the fact that the absence of Revolution in Germany was the cause of their suffering did not escape Hitler, and most Germans; they just went for the wrong type of Revolution).

Conclusion for today’s world:

We, the World, are led by very few people. 2,000 people or so, have unimaginable powers in their hands. Many of them are ignorant twerps, like this 27 year old dissimulating pilot (a doctor had ordered him to stop working; he tore up the order). Putin’s weird, mass criminal behavior is a case in point.

Nuclear weapons are an extreme danger. So much power in such small devices.

However, so are those leaders we have: so much power, in such small minds.

One has to take measures to reduce the powers of the few. It should be civilization mission number one.

Seven billion led by a few people, each of them harboring, deep inside, the fundamental human insanity of rage supreme, is not a sustainable proposition.

Too much power led by too little intelligence is flying us into a cliff.

Patrice Ayme’

 

EINSTEIN’S ERROR: The Multiverse

In 1905, his so-called Wonder Year, Albert Einstein presented a theory of the photoelectric effect. The new idea came in just two lines. However I boldly claim that Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, although gloriously correct, was also, below the Nobel-winning surface, crucially wrong. A photoelectric truth covering a grievous localization lie. It was Einstein’s Greatest Error. Quantum Field Theory implicitly contradicts Einstein, by replacing particles with fields, that is, delocalizing them.

I claim that Einstein talked too much. His intuition was not careful enough, and too tied up with old fashion particles. Quantum Mechanics, one of the inventors Einstein was, questioned the very nature of elementary particles. Einstein imposed, at the outset, a solution, which, I claim, was erroneous.

What Einstein ought to have said is that electromagnetic energy was absorbed in packets of energy hf (h was Planck’s Constant, f the frequency of the light). That explained immediately the photoelectric effect. It was just enough to explain the photoelectric effect.

My Intuition Is More Informed Than Yours

***

PHOTOELECTRIC EFFECT EXPLAINED SOLELY AS RECEPTION QUANTIZATION:

An electron receiving energy from light, receives a packet hf. If f is too small, the electron cannot be emitted: the electron needed some energy, say A, to escape the material. One needs hf > A.

Nor can an electron just pile up energy from light until the stored energy exceeded A. Why? Because energy is RECEIVED in such packets, and only these packets. It was hf, or nothing.

That explanation of the photoelectric effect was both necessary and SUFFICIENT. Such an explanation is exactly the symmetric statement of the one made by Planck in 1900.

(Planck did much more than that, he had to invent his constant, and it is astounding that he did not explain the photoelectric effect, as he had done 99% of the work).

Should Einstein have said what I said, he would have explained the photoelectric effect, instead of putting all of physics on an erroneous path.

***

EINSTEIN LOCALIZATION, AN ERRONEOUS HYPOTHESIS:

However, Einstein instead said something prophetic he had no reason to proffer.

Here is Einstein statement from 1905, translated from German:

“Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.”

[I emphasized what I view as the grievously erroneous part.]

With Planck’s E = hf, this is what gave Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. So not only Einstein got it wrong, but so did the Nobel committee.

(Planck objected strenuously, because he never meant for the Electro-Magnetic field to be quantized outside the blackbody cavity. I agree about quantization upon reception, as that explanation works. My objection is that Einstein had no proof of what he advanced about LOCALIZATION.)

Einstein claimed that light is made of “quanta localized at points in space, moving without dividing”. Thus, Einstein invented elementary particles. Einstein had no reason for of this fabrication, whatsoever, and did not need it, as I said.

***

THE POISONOUS WAVE-EIGENSTATE SALAD:

Fast forward thirty years. By then, thanks to the likes of Dirac (inventor of Quantum Electro Dynamics, who stumbled on Cartan’s Spinor Space and Antimatter) and Von Neumann (Functional Analysis maven), etc. the Quantum formalism had been sculpted like Mount Rushmore in the mountains of natural philosophy.

The formalism consisted in claiming that the elementary particles invented by Albert were vectors in a (Hilbert) space whose basis was made of the possible results of the experiment E.

The mathematics worked well.

However, IF Einstein’s initial invention was false, so was the picture of reality it conveyed.

And indeed, as we saw, Einstein had no reason to claim what he did: he violated Newton’s “Hypotheses Non Fingo” (“I do not FABRICATE hypotheses”… my translation).

Isaac Newton: …”I do not fabricate hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.”

***

DEMOLISHING THE MULTIVERSE ERROR:

Galileo, to expose his ideas more pedagogically, set-up a trialogue, between “Simplicius” and two others (one being Galileo himself).

I pursue my exposition of what those who believe in the Multiverse cannot dare to articulate, as it would expose their utter confusion, and more:

Simplicius: So you say that Einstein fabricated localized Quanta, out of his fertile imagination, and that axiom wrecked all of physics?

Patrice Ayme: Exactly. I would prefer to call it not fertile, but obsolete, imagination. After Einstein had fabricated his seemingly innocuous hypothesis, the localized elementary particle, the next step was to identify it with the wave function.

Simplicius: Do you not insist that the world is mostly made of Quantum Waves?

PA: Yes but “Wave Functions” are just fist order approximations of “Quantum Waves”. “Wave Functions” cannot be real, they are mathematical artefacts.

Simplicius: How come?

PA: Wave functions are made of end states, the so-called eigenvectors, the end products of experiments. That makes wave functions intrinsically teleological, made up of the future. You may as well identify human beings to their tombstones, that’s how they end up.

Simplicius: What is the connection with the Multiverse?

PA: Wave functions are intrinsically multiversal, they are made by adding different outcomes, as if they all happened. But only one can ever happen, in the end. However, when in flight, we are been told that (Einstein’s) localized particle is made of as many pieces of universes as there are eigenstates.

Simplicius: So you conclude that Einstein’s localized quantum hypothesis plus the basic Quantum Formalism implies that the simplest elementary particle is made of pieces of different universes that will happen in the future?

PA: Exactly. Einstein, in conjunction with the Hilbert formalism, invented the Multiverse. This is what Everett observed, and, at the time, it made the inventors of Quantum Mechanics (minus Planck and Einstein) so uncomfortable that Everett was booted out of theoretical physics, an even his adviser Wheeler turned against him.

Simplicius: But did not Einstein demonstrate with the EPR thought experiment that “elements of reality” could not be localized?

PA: Exactly. With a little help from Karl Popper, maybe. Entanglement has been experimentally shown to not be localizable with the metric used in General Relativity. So light quanta themselves not only are not points, something that was obvious all along, sorry Einstein, but also, the speed of light is an emerging metric for the Universe.

It has been a conspiracy all along.

Simplicius: Conspiracy?

PA: Yes, there is a famous mistake in Dirac’s Principles of Quantum Mechanics. He insists that a photon interfere only with itself. That is demonstrably false (radio interference and independent lasers playing double slit). Dirac had to say that to NOT make the Quantum Waves themselves the main actors.

Simplicius: Why would physicists conspire to push false physics?

PA: Because, if they admit that their physics is false, and have nothing better to propose, they are losing status. (Whereas I improve mine by showing why they are wrong.)

Another point is that the “Multiverse” is suitably mysterious and absurd to impress common people. It is obviously the greatest miracle imaginable, so those who have penetrated this secrecy are very great men.

WHAT IS GOING ON?

We saw Einstein’s hypothesis of localization led to the Multiverse. As the Multiverse is unacceptable, so is the localization hypothesis.

But we already knew this in several ways (diffraction, 2-slit, and other non-local wave effects; plus EPR style experiments, let alone the QM formalism itself, which also predicts non-localization).

The intuition of the real sub-quantic theory depends, in part, on such facts.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S (2021); In one sentence: The multiverse theory comes from a nefarious cognitive interference between Einstein’s unproven theory of momentum-energy pointwise localism with the nonlocal nature of (quantum) dynamics.

Some Basics Of Natural Philosophy

NO MULTIVERSE, NO PLATONISM (Less Air Travel, Too):

Some people go around, and brandish the “Multiverse”. Of course, the “Multiverse” exists, in one’s brain. The brain, among other things, extends all over imagination. Out there, among the galaxies, in the real world, there is no reason to suppose there is a “Multiverse, whatsoever.

It is basically something to sell books with. Or, just as with evil minded religions, for some physicists to claim they are like gods and can believe in something really absurd, and grotesquely self-contradictory:

There is No Universe, But the Universe:

The Universe is all there is. By definition. By philosophical definition. Just by philosophical definition? Not so. Any logic is associated to a universe. If the “logic” is nature itself (“all of the logic”) the associated universe (in the Logic sense), is, well, the Universe.

If something some would want to call the “Multiverse”, whatever that would be, existed, it would be part of the Universe.

Galaxies Used To Be Called “Island Universes”. They Collide; This Is A Much Older Universe Than People Understand

***

Age Of The Universe? Really?

Befuddled physicists go around, telling us about the “First Three Minutes” (Weinberg; Electro-Weak Nobel laureate), or the “History Of Time” (Hawking; remarkable survivor-physicist in a wheelchair).

That rests on their perfect knowledge of how the universe evolved.

This, in turn, depends upon ignoring Dark Energy. Dark Energy shows up as an unpredicted acceleration of the expansion of the Universe.

The old theory of expansion of the Universe was established before Dark Energy was discovered.

So they think they know, but I know they don’t really know.

I don’t know if the Universe has an age. But it is aging, or, at least, let’s be more cautious, the Universe is changing.

***

How Both Physics And Mathematics Became Not Even Wrong:

Mathematics themselves have always been developed in particular directions, in light of what it was felt was needed to understand the physical world. That was certainly true with Buridan, and his students, who developed computational methods, and graphs, to handle what they wanted to do with inertia. That was true with calculus developed for all sorts of engineering and physics explanations.

And so on through the next three centuries. However, in the last three decades, what I personally viewed as extremely erroneous notions in physics became dominant.

Indeed, it had become that clear time was not “relative” (whatever that is supposed to mean). True, time was local, as per Relativity, but it was local in an absolute way. The absoluteness comes from Quantum Theory… And the absoluteness of curvature in cosmology (the focusing of light, by galaxies and galactic clusters is absolute, thus so is time, locally around such focusing objects!).

Efforts were launched towards was felt would be the mathematics of “superstrings” and “field theory”. That would have been wonderful, if the initial meta-axiom motivating the whole enterprise, that nature worked with strings, super, and field mathematics perched on field math, all the way down… had been, roughly, correct.

Mathematics is not “natural”. Or let’s say, not anymore “natural” than the human brain can get contrived. Mathematics is an adventure in what the geometry, the Quantum geometry, of neurology is capable of.

Mathematics is not unreasonably effective (as the famous physicist-mathematician Wigner put it).

Mathematics is reason, manipulated to be effective in a particular way. Correctly determining in advance what the way will be makes the difference between understanding nature, and failing to do so.

Math is just, roughly, neuronal geometry that “works” (“working” here meaning what the brain does, whatever it is, beyond just manipulating electric and chemical signals).

***

Do We Need To Tour Frantically With Jets? 

In other news, after the crash in France of a Lufthansa A320 plane, pundits will surely come, and claim aloud that air travel is the safest mode of travel.

Is it? It depends upon the method of measurement.

The way advertisers come up with the “air travel is the safest form of travel” statement is by dividing number of people killed by distance travelled.

However, another measure would be to divide the number of people killed by the number of travels they engaged in. This is a more significant measure to think about. And air travel looks much good that way: in just one day in Europe, more car travels happen than all the air travel for the entire world, in a year.

Not to say that air travel should be discouraged. It is not exactly like smoking, with no redeeming value, whatsoever. Families ought to be reunited. Getting to know other countries, encouraged. However one week tourism, far away, thanks to plane travel ought, in my opinion, to be discouraged.

Instead, the projections are that air travel will augment considerably in the next few decades.

Between Barcelona and Dusseldorf, one ought to be able to travel just as fast by rail (not all the high speed lines are built, nor will they be built, thanks to plutocratically imposed austerity, and subsidies to… air travel). Electric trains pollute much less, by more than an order of magnitude, and are much safer.

The global CO2 situation is that bad. Besides, look at that entire high school classroom of fifteen year old that went down with the plane… Just for a week in Barcelona?

Patrice Ayme’

Why God Is Evil

The Victorian philosopher and mathematician W. K. Clifford’s following admonition is at the core of the moral call of the “New Atheists”, a few mini philosophers who make the Anglo-American divine plutocratic order tremble: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

An academic philosopher appropriately called “Ruse” concludes his article “Why God Is A Moral Issue” with: “[Clifford’s] universal claim may be too strong. But too often religious believers seem oblivious to Clifford’s admonition and accept things with way too little evidence. That I much suspect is what motivates the New Atheists and in fact expresses the deepest and most powerful moral objection to theism.”

Difference Between Us & Grizzlies? Not Much Greater Love, But Much Greater Smarts.

[Smarts is what religions kill, and humanity with it, as I will pound below.]

Clifford was a great mathematician. He pushed further the idea of Riemann that force and curvature are roughly the same (this is the core intuition in the Theory of Gravitation commonly attributed to Einstein).

I agree with Clifford, sort of, but I am going to go much further.

Is it wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence?

Sure. However, it is unavoidable. And this is not really the problem with “isms” such as Christianism and Islamism.

The distinction between guessing and believing is, in general, not too clear, and insufficient evidence is more frequent that certainty (that’s called science).

But clearly believing something important with insufficient evidence can be a maximum moral wrong, when it is about life and death of entire populations.

What Superstition Based Religions Kill.

Some religions have actually orders, in their sacred texts, not just to tax, or punish, but even to kill various “unbelievers” if they are “culprit” of some behaviors. This is all over the Qur’an, as I generously documented in “Violence In The Holy Qur’an“. Yet the Qur’an was following the Old Testament by  11 centuries, and the new one (where Christ also recommends to kill unbelievers) by 6 centuries or so.

The nature and consequences of the evidence supporting a “belief” is of the utmost importance. If one believes that jumping from the fourth floor will have adverse consequences, it’s good, especially for passerby.

Yet, precisely, some religions have been organized so as to make one believe completely incredible feats (one son of god walked on water, came back from the dead, another “messenger” flew on the back of a winged horse from Mecca to Jerusalem, etc.).

These unbelievable details are not there by accident. They are there to dull the sense of critique people learn to exert in early childhood.

Learning to believe in unbelievable, absurd details is a preparation for the ultimate sin:

“It is the highest criminality always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything potentially capable of oppressing, exploiting, stealing, abusing, invading, threatening, torturing and killing millions for insufficient or flimsy reasons.”

Seven Jewish children just died in New York. It was Shabbat, a sort of Jewish sorcery day. The order then, from the god of the Jews, is that no work ought to be done. Including turning off the hot plate. So the hot plate, or god, whatever, set the house on fire. God is great! Alleluia!

(This sort, of we-shall-do-nothing, Inch Allah (god wills it), dieu-le-veut, led to millions killed, the latest major example in sight being the holocaust of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis: Jews did not resist as much as they could have, but, instead, the “Judenraten” collaborated with Hitler. The simplest way to stop Hitler was just to tell all Germans what the Nazis were truly doing, assassinating the Jews, and add that they were all responsible, and would be punished accordingly. That could have been done with little pieces of paper dropped from planes at the same time as the bombs.)

Both Islam and Christianity have in their sacred texts, “verses of the sword” where holly script recommend to “kill unbelievers”. (Yes, as already said many times, Christ too; one good enough reason for crucifixion!)

Once one has become so morally inferior as to be ready to do such terrible things to millions, for so little cause, one is ready for even much worse.

Religions based on knowing god, and giving their followers deadly recommendations on how to deal with “unbelievers” incite human beings to the ultimate inhumanity.

Not just because of the potential, theoretical, experimental, and historical mayhem they are prone to.

How could one do something worse than being willing to kill millions for little cause?

Not simply by transforming human beings into vicious human beings. But into even worse creatures.

How could that be?

It is as monstrous as it gets. What is the definition of the human species? Intelligence.

What does dulling human beings’ sense of critique to the point that one would kill for a drawing, or for looking at ancient art, or listening to music?

It is very simple: religions that extreme in light of the lethal consequences their beliefs may bring, makes human beings into stupid beasts.

In case you don’t believe me, look at Abraham tying up his son, so he can stab him.

See my “Follies That Bind.” Where you can see the great Judeo-Christiano-Muslim hero stabbing a child. (Hey, His boSS told him to! You know, you should always obey the boss, both the Qur’an, S 4, v 59, and its parrot, Hitler, said so.)

So Abraham stabs children, and Christians lick his toes. Precisely because he stabs children. Then Catholics and other mentality untalented sinkers, claim to be surprised that priests rape children and the like. Well, but, of course! Those good Judeo-Christo-Islamists are following Abraham, the most cruel, and thus adored beast in the known universe!

And that, willful beastly stupidity of the most criminal type, is the ultimate sin, because it is the ultimate denial of morality.

This is no coincidence: both Christianism and Islamism have been imposed by war chiefs (Constantine, Jovian, Theodosius and other emperors for Christianism; Muhammad and the four initial Caliphs). They had a vested interest to make the people they ruled over credulous, immoral, subdued, and not smart.

They were highly successful.

And this is why American plutocracy reintroduced god massively to the USA in the 1930s (as even the New York Times recently explained), and why then it made a pact with Ibn Saud to push the ideology of Islamism in the Middle East, in 1945 (See the “Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy“).

Not that this was an accident: the USA made deals with Egypt “Muslim Brotherhood” in the late 1940s, and Khomeini’s Shiites in Iran in 1953, to organize a coup against Parliamentary Democracy (and then proceeded to back stab both of them, of course). Same in Pakistan.

You reap what you sowed. Plutocracy sowed superstitious religion and stupidity, it is reaping the best plutocracy in a century. What could go wrong, when wrong has been defined as good, and, even, divine?

If it is good to kill your son, as Abraham and his robotic followers claim, how could things ever get worse? How dumber can one get?

Patrice Ayme’

Senegal Cleaner. Britain, Rest Of West, Clueless

The son of the previous president of Senegal, Karim Wade, was condemned to six years in jail. Reason? A special Senegalese “Anti-Corruption Court” found that, thanks to complex financial conspiracies, Karim stole 178 million dollars.

He was also condemned to a 230 million dollar fine. Wade, Karim, does not have (yet) to regurgitate most of his 1.4 billion dollar fortune.

President Wade was (officially) a socialist, and ruled for 12 years.

Now Senegal, a country where I grew more, as a child, than any other, has a long democratic tradition.

There Are Better Things To Do In Senegal Than Hypocritically Whine About Slavery

Judge Henri Gregoire Diop said Wade had hidden away funds in offshore companies in the British Virgin Islands and Panama: “The facts before us constitute illicit enrichment by Karim Wade“.

Notice that plutocracy is global. Many of the richest people in Britain escape taxation by claiming to reside in just those places, where Karim hid (some) of his corruption money. But, there in the UK, supposedly a democracy, that sort of corruption is perfectly legal. Maybe Karim should have become British in a timely manner?

***

Corruption In West; Example Of Britain:

I have been saying this sort of things for years. George Monbiot, in The Guardian, just noticed it in “Let’s not fool ourselves. We may not bribe, but corruption is rife in Britain”

[Thanks to Paul Handover for calling my attention to Monbiot’s article.]

Says Mr. Monbiot: “Common practices in the rich nations that could reasonably be labelled corrupt are excluded [from consideration when evaluating countries’ corruption]; common practices in the poor nations are emphasized [to claim that they are the ones which are corrupted, whereas corruption in poor nations is mickey-mouse stuff relative to the industrial strength, astronomical corruption in the richest nations].

This week a ground-changing book called How Corrupt is Britain?, edited by David Whyte, is published. It should be read…

Would there still be commercial banking sector in this country if it weren’t for corruption? Think of the list of scandals: pensions mis-selling, endowment mortgage fraud, the payment protection insurance scam, Libor rigging, insider trading and all the rest. Then ask yourself whether fleecing the public is an aberration – or the business model.

No senior figure has been held criminally liable or has even been disqualified for the practices that helped to trigger the financial crisis, partly because the laws that should have restrained them were slashed by successive governments. A former minister in this government ran [the huge, immensely criminally corrupt, politicians, drug lords and Al Qaeda financing, bank] HSBC while it engaged in systematic tax evasion, money laundering for drugs gangs and the provision of services to Saudi and Bangladeshi banks linked to the financing of terrorists. Instead of prosecuting the bank, the head of the UK’s tax office went to work for it when he retired.

***

Britain As Tax Heaven: Second Best

Monbiot is obviously unfamiliar with the reality of plutocratic rule in the USA. If he were, he would realize that Britain is the World’s Second Tax Haven. But, otherwise, all he says is correct:

The City of London, operating with the help of British overseas territories and crown dependencies, is the world’s leading tax haven, controlling 24% of all offshore financial services. It offers global capital an elaborate secrecy regime, assisting not just tax evaders but also smugglers, sanctions- busters and money-launderers.

As the French investigating magistrate Eva Joly has complained, the City “has never transmitted even the smallest piece of usable evidence to a foreign magistrate”. The UK, Switzerland, Singapore, Luxembourg and Germany are all ranked by Transparency International as among the least corrupt nations in the world. They are also listed by the Tax Justice Network as among the worst secrecy regimes and tax havens. For some reason, though, that doesn’t count.

The Private Finance Initiative has been used by our governments to deceive us about the extent of their borrowing while channelling public money into the hands of corporations. Shrouded in secrecy, stuffed with hidden sweeteners, it has landed hospitals and schools with unpayable debts, while hiding public services from public scrutiny.

Relying on the World Bank to assess corruption is like asking Vlad the Impaler for an audit of human rights.”

Except that Vlad could make a human right argument (freeing his country from impaling Islamists). Our present plutocrats and their greedy servants can make no such argument.

I will write more about the problems in Britain in the future.

Here is George Monbiot’s conclusion, which is pertinent to the problems less developed countries encounter, as they are dominated by Western plutocracy:

“For organisations such as the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, there is little difference between the public interest and the interests of global corporations. What might look like corruption from any other perspective looks to them like sound economics. The power of global finance and the immense wealth of the global elite are founded on corruption, and the beneficiaries have an interest in framing the question to excuse themselves.

[And they do, with the help of economics departments and pundits, all over the globe.]

Yes, many poor nations are plagued by the kind of corruption that involves paying bribes to officials. But the problems plaguing us run deeper. When the system already belongs to the elite, bribes are superfluous.”

Indeed.

In the West, it is not just politicians who are corrupt. It is the law itself. It was written, for plutocrats, by their servants. This is, of course, the way plutocracy has always operated. They even have done better in the USA: they made the USA into a so-called “Christian nation”, a place where the befuddled worries more about some guy who never existed, than in bothering to perceived that they are exploited in a system increasingly reminiscent of serfdom.

***

Why Is Senegal So Civilized?

Wade was a senior minister in his father’s government, and was in charge of major infrastructure and energy projects. It was a time when Korean factory ships were allowed to hug the Senegalese coast line, making a fortune for themselves, and starving the Senegalese (who depend heavily upon fish for proteins).

The Senegalese dubbed the soon immensely wealthy Karim “minister of the earth and the sky“.

How did Senegal become so wise?

Three millennia of trading ideas from all over.

Senegal was mostly freed from the past when a handful of French officers under Paris’ command, pacified and unified the country in the nineteenth century. The dozen or so officers commanded an army of 5,000 natives (who did all the work).

Contacts between Senegal and the West are much older than that: under Louis XIV, Senegalese had French nationality. Much earlier Senegal had a salted fish trade going on with Carthage (showing that the human impact on the Mediterranean is not new).

***

Inverted Gorée Racism, PC Style:

Nowadays, when supposedly knowledgeable Westerners only talk about the tiny island of Gorée when evoking Senegal, sort of like talking only about the guillotine when evoking France, or the electric chair, when evoking the USA.

It is a subtle, unconscious, anti-French, anti-Senegalese racism (the so-called “House of Slaves” in Gorée was built by a Franco-Senegalese family).

In truth, as the French controlled Gorée for nearly three centuries, except for 4 years under British control, few slaves passed through it. The French frowned on the slave trade, but certainly could not outlaw it completely until they ruled Senegal!

What counts in a civilizations is what has been institutionalized. In advanced parts of Senegal, for centuries, the part the French controlled, slavery was not institutionalized (differently from the USA, and other forsaken places).

***

Worst In The Rest:

The rest of the West (Senegal is part of the West, civilizationally speaking), is also corrupt, but the corrupt politicians there do not get judged, just admired.

Worse: the systems of thought, moods, and institutions connected to them, are corrupt… to the point few believe they are.

Here is an on-going example.

Right now the central banks of the West keep interest rates roughly around zero percent. The reason that is officially proclaimed is that, thus, the banks can extend very low interest loans to economic actors.

However, that is a lie.

80% of the money presently created goes to High Financial sector. Only 20% goes to the real economy.

This is corruption. Why are judges not rising? Because they have been brain-washed, long ago. Also the corruption is more spread-out, in the leading countries, than it was in Senegal. Millions feed off the excesses of the banking or health-industrial complex.

What Karim Wade was doing has been philosophically determined, long ago, as corrupt. Not so for the present banking, or even, political system.

***

Meanwhile Among Blown-Away Microbes…

95% of the capital of the Republic of Vanuatu, a long but tiny archipelago in the next ridge north of New Caledonia, has been destroyed by a greenhouse force 5 cyclone.

A few decades ago, Vanuatu was called the “New Hebrides” and was part of Britain and France. If it still was such a part and portion, no doubt the French and British government would use their considerable means to help (the French are helping, but not as much as if Vanuatu was still part of France).

So called “decolonization” has passed by, and Vanuatuans are now free to independently fend for themselves.

(As above with Karim Wade, so-called “decolonization” is all about global plutocrats making irresistible deals with local potentates. By the way, Karim does not have to regurgitate most of his ill-gotten fortune. I am ready to bet much is in French banks, cozy and cuddly with stolen Greek fortunes…)

Good luck to Vanuatu in its hut rebuilding project. GDP per capita in Vanuatu in 2014 was $3,200. In next door French New Caledonia, per capita GDP is $39,000 (about 12 times more).

Empire has its advantages. But less so, and even just the opposite, when under the orders of plutocrats.

Patrice Ayme’

France, Islamism: Garbage Above, Garbage Out

FRENCH GARBAGE BLOSSOMING, A SONG OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE:

Incredible garbage shown on French TV. The sides of some French roads, including the busiest freeway in Europe, look like dumps, before modern regulations, closed such dumps. It got dangerous: a passing car could hit discarded metal machinery.

The phenomenon is new. Last I passed through Paris, a few years ago, going to the airport, I was shocked to see so much garbage along the freeway.

This is unimaginable in California. It was unimaginable in France of decades past. Times are changing, they always have. After being at the forefront of civilization for centuries, with its own civilization, Carthage, Tunisia reached even higher heights under Rome:

Blatantly Islamophobic Roman Art From Bardo Museum, Tunis

[The Bardo Museum was attacked by Islamists last week. The 88 years old, democratically elected Tunisian president, condemned that “minority of savages who do not scare us.”

This is an attack similar to the two in France: a purely cultural attack. The chief ideologist of the Islamic State is 27 years old. And apparently interprets the Qur’an and Hadith literally. Just like yours truly. More below.]

But a few more words first, about French garbage. Garbage in the street is related to terrorism against civilization, the one and only, through war minded, austerity armed, all-encompassing plutocracy. Plutocracy is the crafty manipulator behind Islamism.

I can understand why the French dump garbage. It is not just symbolic. There are more and more laws in France about recycling and other silliness.

Meanwhile the air is not breathable in Paris, because scientific advice to the government was wrong, advising to decrease CO2 while augmenting more lethal tiny particles of hydrocarbons. The government just ordered alternated circulation, effective now. The air many people are forced to breathe in France is garbage, thanks to their government imbecility, over a period of two decades.

Normal people have found more expedient to dump garbage along roads than to respect all the ukases their glorified rulers have devised from inside their gilded palaces (the places of decision in France are literally covered with gold).

So the government is spending a measly 5 million euros to clean roads around Paris. You know, austerity, so that the plutocrats can roll in dough from their monopolies and paying little tax, if any.

A government official piously offered the hope that people who throw garbage along the roads will stiffen their patriotic spine and respect the law, looking forward.

But what’s the law? For the Commons, the Vulgar, the Middle Class, the law is that they ought to recycle, even if it takes hours, and that’s all the scientific law that children need to learn at school.

But that is only one side of the law.

The other side is that Bill Gates is one of history’s greatest monopolist, that he did not pay billions of euros of taxes he ought to have paid, but then he is the world’s richest man and one is supposed to admire his charity.

It also surfaced that the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) staff unanimously voted to prosecute Google on a number of charges. But then the commissioners voted, just as unanimously, against it (that is completely unusual). This is sheer corruption.

It is just the sort of corruption that is completely legal in the West. As Monbiot points out in The Guardian about the UK. (I have been saying this for a decade, glad to see it is finally reaching the MSM!)

So why should common French people spend hours a week respecting laws that, viewed as an ensemble, have been obviously designed to exploit and oppress them?

Brazilians have the same question. The Constitution of Brazil was designed according to Auguste Comte’s positivist philosophy. And now it turns out that politicians in Brazil just wanted to become as rich as they could.

Even “The Economist” had to admit to my point number two in politics. To put it my way: the Wisdom of the Crowds is greater than the wisdom of the few.

So the French will keep on throwing garbage out, wherever, at 2 AM. (They just gave the Socialist Party less votes than the National Front in elections today.)

How come the citizens of the USA do not do the same? Throwing garbage along the roads?

First, American citizens don’t feel oppress: that’s for “losers”, and whiners.

Second, if USA citizens throw a banana peel, the High Patrol will be happy to stop them, tell them to keep hands on the wheel (lest they want to be shot), check them out on the computer, call back-up, and, or, handcuff them as needed.

In any case, they will have a right to a jury trial somewhere out there, maybe tens or hundreds, or thousands of miles away from home. Or then they can pay $1,000. One thousand dollars is the standard garbage fine.

Unsurprisingly, garbage out is something very ordered in the USA.

If any of the preceding is not dissuasive enough, drivers can contemplate prisoners in bright orange uniforms picking up whatever garbage would still be present along the roads.

Having the world’s greatest incarcerated population has some undeniable advantages… And highly noticeable garbage picking by prison crews is a good pretext for reminding good, common Americans that the rule of law is absolute, and knows no decency.

The somewhat tyrannical rule of the law enables the USA to integrate immigrants relatively easily. Immigrants know they have to keep to the straight and narrow. If they don’t, law enforcement will fall on them as a ton of bricks.

Pseudo-intellectuals will scoff. But it works, and it was the essential insight of the Roman Republic: “Dura Lex, Sed Lex”, represented by the Fascses (still prominent at the core symbolic of the republics of the USA and France; other powers do not brandish the fasces, and it shows, not for the best!)

For the Republic to go on, the law has to be ethologically correct.

Plutocratic law is the exact opposite.

So the music has to change.

Voting for extreme parties is a solution, because the situation has decayed so much that only extreme solutions are reasonable. (In the USA there are no viable extreme parties, so the alternative is not to vote; the case of California is a bit different: it has a slightly more reasonable government, and continual referenda.)

Music is communication, with others, and other parts of one’s brain.

Politics is also communications (right now, it is soiled with power greed, but that can be fixed. At least, in theory.)

Meanwhile the French Prime Minister has been identifying the French left with Syriza, the main Greek Party which won power in January (when Manuel Valls started to run against it).

This is rather curious.

The most outrageous demand of Syriza is that Germany pay 170 billion euros for its attack, invasion, destruction, deportation and execution of much of the Greek population.

Germany never paid any reparations to Greece.

(Although payments of 2.5 euros for each day passed in Auschwitz and the like, were made to some survivors.)

If Germany wants to talk tough about 65 billion euros Greece owes it, why can’t Greece talk tough too?

Because French and German banks hold tens of billions of euros of money stolen to the Greek People, by Greek plutocrats.

In Tunisia, Islamists attacked the Bardo Museum, to kill tourists (they chose the number one day, Wednesday, when cruise ships discharge their tourists). This is the second museum in Africa. It is 200 meters from the National Assembly.

The museum demonstrates that, before the Islamists invaded, Tunisia had a long and enormous civilization. So the Bardo museum is the very symbol of Islamophobia, and general contempt for the so-called “Messenger”. As far as Islamists are concerned.

There are, in particular, extensive Roman art works, unique in the world, inside the Bardo (see above, and notice the Islamophobic woman flaunting her divine status, and Allah given body).

One of the assailants of the Bardo looked completely normal, he lived in a good area, in a good house, and his extensive family was very surprised that he felt so strongly about following the Qur’an’s orders.

Why are people still surprised? Are not orders, orders? Orders from god, of all people! Why can’t those who are always so surprised, able to read the Qur’an? Violence in the Holly Qur’an make the best terror project anywhere.

Why so much denial about what is inside the Qur’an?

Because it has become a (lucrative) tradition. Many pseudo-intellectuals, instead of holding on principle (as De Sade, or Nietzsche did), sold themselves to whoever looked strong enough at the time (Stalin, Wall Street, Washington, etc.). Pleasing the strong made for a profitable career. So they defined any murmur against the Bitter Lake conspiracy propelled Islamist madness as racist “Islamophobia”.

Islamophilia is the worst enemy of the population of the Middle East, and thus the best friend of those who want to control the oil flow (lots of it right now, to bring various powers to their knees).

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Obama is seething against Bibi Netanyahu, for all to see. Whatever. Bibi has a plan, at least medium term (invade the West Bank with colons). Others do not have a plan. Not that Iran, long allied to Israel (much of the time secretly), minds.

The world is becoming a bit too complex. We have seen what happens in a case like this. In 1914. However, in 1914, the German fascists, who attacked, had a superior army (as their successors did, in 1940). A good way to prevent instability, is for the more democratic states to keep military superiority.

Lest I would be accused of rabid pro-Americanism, let me observe that, although the sides of roads in the USA are clean, it is not so inside many cities with the mentally insane. Whereas in Europe, such people (except if they are Rom, as Manuel Valls would probably notice) go inside hospitals, in the USA, since Reagan, they are free to own the sidewalks.

But let us have a bit more austerity in Europe, and all those who are not rich enough will be free to roam the streets. To mingle with normal youth suddenly turning to terrorism. Surprise, surprise.

Patrice Ayme’