If You Want Peace, Make War

A lesson hard to swallow for those who feel peace wins all. Sometimes, all you can do, and all you have to do, is war:

Those who have never bothered to observe reality long pretended that, to have peace, one just needed to roll belly up, and make love. As anybody who has studied the wilderness can tell you, this tends to occur when the carnivores tear the soft belly of the prey, starting generally by the apparently succulent naughty bits. Even Obama seems to have vaguely realized that his entire presidency was a devouring alive of his so-called “hope you can believe”. So he is sending 50 special forces to Syria. Wow.

What needs to be imposed in the Middle East is forceful Western philosophy, the sort which has turned China around, after 26 centuries of Confucianism.

Everyday, at this point, 8,000 war refugees reach the island of Lesbos, just off the Anatolian coast, but part of the European Union. Officially Greece, which has only 11 million citizens, admitted 600,000 war refugees, in a few months. Europeans are officially sending money to help Greece, but it did not arrive yet: notice that, when people are dying, by the thousands, it’s no big deal, but if a state threatens to spend more money than private bankers are willing to lend to it, it is the crime of all crimes, the crime that the world cannot, should not, will not tolerate.

The Black Mamba Is A Fact. Kill From A Great Distance. Or Get Real Smart.

A Black Mamba can bring up a third of its body, and look a man in the eye. And it is a very aggressive, some say furious, snake, feared by all including herds of buffalos. Still prehistoric man learned to live with it very well. Meanwhile, Austria is building a wall. A wall, all along its border with Slovenia. Slovenia is, in more ways than one, basically, historically and geographically speaking, a part of… Austria.

What to do? First, find out which superior philosophy should guide us. Inebriation with the “make love, not war” philosophy leads only to four bullets in the back, as John Lennon dramatically demonstrated. Europe ought not to tolerate gross violations, gross deviations from the norms of… Western civilization. While considering the origins: for example, one cannot order Arabia to behave as civilized, as, say, Israel… Simply because Arabian brains have more work to do to get civilized. In practice, it means that the deliberate destruction of housing and other deliberate

invasive actions of the Israeli government ought not to be tolerated, because they are part of a descent to hell, whereas Saudi Arabia has to ascent from hell. So, being in hell is not enough

information: as in physics, one has to consider momentum and potential (this may sound vague, but it’s not just correct relativity, but correct Quantum Mechanics: De Broglie introduced momentum in 1924, and Bohm & Aharanov noticed in 1956, that potential energy was part of De Broglie’s reasoning, and that this had practical consequences; so this is the case where the strict analogy with physics has practical political consequences!)

Human beings do not have all the same interests. Yet, notwithstanding the unreal elucubrations of the animal rights fanatics, the rights of a Nazi, the rights of a serial killer, the rights of

Palestinian backstabber, or the rights of financial manipulators, are not the same of that of a Syrian infant landing on Lesbos. The latter are worth dying for, whereas the former are worth killing like venomous snakes.

Killing venomous snakes? Is not that uncalled for, unphilosophical, plain nasty, and unwise? A few years back, some individuals suggested that death by venomous snakes was a major problem. Generalized laughter followed, at the highest level of those supposedly in charge of world health care. Venomous snakes have interests, and therefore rights, the animal fanatics would point out, let them be. Assuredly, fighting snakes sounded biblical, and could not possibly be correct, or as noble as fighting Ebola. However those who are anchored in reality persisted.

As a child, I remember seeing many venomous snakes, and I feared them intensely. Having one in my bed was a recurring nightmare. True, there were some in the thatched roof in Ivory Coast. I also played with deadly Yellow Scorpion in the desert (“coucou be’!”), before parental intervention, and another time a scorpion stung my mom in bed. One most enlightening encounter was with a Black Mamba in Senegal (contrarily to comments on the Internet, the Black Mamba is Senegal, probably the first met by Europeans, is not olive grey, but black; it’s not just its mouth). The snake fled, much faster than I could run, or even see, it was mostly a blur. A long black blur, an incredibly long black blur, like several bull whips long, whipping all over the place, yet so fast, going where it willed.

Well, consulting reality would help: venomous snakes kill hundreds of thousand of people, every year. One of the reason? Colonial institutes such as the Pasteur Institute have found too onerous to maintain enough reserves of antiserum at the ready. You want to live, you envenomated savages? Go back to colonialism. (Somebody will have to pay for it, though.)

In other news, Netanyahu corrected his lie on the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem giving the idea of the extermination of Jews. He actually said word for word what was already said on this site:

Mr. Netanyahu, was criticized by historians (some of them Israeli) for erroneous causality, had already said he never intended to absolve Hitler of responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, but his new statement went further.

“The decision to move from a policy of deporting Jews to the Final Solution was made by the Nazis and was not dependent on outside influence,” Mr. Netanyahu posted on Facebook, in Hebrew and English. “The Nazis saw in the Mufti a collaborator, but they did not need him to decide on the systematic destruction of European Jewry, which began in June 1941…Contrary to the impression that was created, I did not mean to claim that in his conversation with Hitler in November 1941 the Mufti convinced him to adopt the Final Solution. The Nazis decided on that by themselves.”

It’s always simpler to tell the truth rather than to tell lies.

The basic story of June 1941 was related here many times: as Operation Barbarossa, the attempted destruction of the USSR, launched to the East, the 150 German army divisions were followed by 3,000 elite men from the “Zonderkommandos” (Special Commandos). The latter were older and generally of a high educational level (such as lawyers). They were also dedicated Nazis whose one and only task was to kill all and any Jews they would encounter.

Many Jews had been already killed by the vengeful Natives: when the area was invaded by the USSR, many Jews were put in charge of the occupying Bolshevik administration, earning them the hatred of the locals, beyond their basic antisemitism.

Hatred is a basic human mode of thinking. To suppress it, one cannot simply piously deplore and condemn it, one has to kill what causes it. In the case of the Middle East, Salafism, the way of the old ones (that’s literally what “Salafism” means) was the way of war.

It was even, as Islam surged in its defeat of the Persian and Roman armies, and its conquest of Syria and its repression of the rebellion in Egypt, the way of total war by extermination of all fighting age men. No, I am not pulling a Netanyahu and getting all confused. Assad and his Alawites, and many other sects, tribes or nations in the Middle East are equally persuaded that, if they don’t exterminate their enemies, they will be exterminated.

This will go on, as long as no more advanced philosophy is imposed there. Meanwhile, to survive in style, Europe needs to embrace a more sustainable philosophy, and that demands imposing order on itself and its neighborhood, by force. Reality is a Black Mamba: it can be lived with, but only given proper precautions.

But that would require correct philosophical leadership, and all the philosophical leadership we have, in these despicable times of ours, is that “markets”, that is, the richest and most obscure, ought to rule. Said markets have no market for Syrian infants, so they don’t care.

During Barbarossa, in five months, five million soldiers died (4 million of them Soviet). Barbarossa failed, because Fall rains and their mud, plus the worst freeze from General Winter in 50 years, arrived before the Nazis could encircle Moscow. Crucial in that non-achievement was that Barbarossa was delayed by 5 weeks (from May 15, 1941, to June 22, 1941). Moreover many elite Nazi units were decimated, wounded and exhausted because of action in Greece and Crete where Greeks and the British gave them a very hard time. A lot of equipment got also used up in that Hellenistic campaign, and not available for Barbarossa anymore, including lots of planes and paratroops (most of them killed in Crete). That’s why the Nazis could only get to see the Kremlin’s golden domes in the distance.

So you want to stop horrendous war? Use more war, in a judicious, and timely manner. Some will sneer, because they do not know history, and they are in no hurry to correct that, as they view history as so immoral, it should not be contemplated, let alone meditated upon (only really nasty people such as me do this, ought of sheer malignancy, or so they feel, before going to play trick or treat with their children…)

Yet war has its logic, and morality flows from it. The crime of the Jews, when Hitler rose, is that they cooperated with Hitler instead of fighting him to death (not just Republican candidate Carson said this, to some extend, but Hannah Arendt, long ago; in any case the historical record is clear).

What happened more precisely, in the case of that delaying attack on Greece, is that Mussolini, the Italian fascist leader, had invaded with his elite armies, the Albanese and Greek regions. The Greek army counterattacked, and walloped the Italian fascists. It was an extremely humiliating defeat. Mussolini had already suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the French, the previous spring. Now with the Greeks? Also there was a strategic problem: could not the British counterattack, through Greece, in the soft belly of the Great Reich, all the way to the vital Rumanian oil fields? So Hitler decided he had to intervene in the Balkans.Thus he attacked Yugoslavia, Greece, Crete. The Greeks resisted fiercely. The Royal Navy ruled the seas. Barbarossa got delayed by a crucial 5 weeks.

Now what would the peaceniks have advised the Greeks to do? Rise the white flag, offer roses to the fascists, have sex with them, give them all properties, dignity, freedom, hope. The Jews were forced into that. And still, they ended exterminated.

The peaceniks wanted the Greeks, and the French, to surrender. Such is their burning desire.  (Most of the people holding this sort of opinion are white, and probably closet racists who wanted Nazi Germany to win). Then Barbarossa would have happened on schedule, and the USSR be defeated. So, instead of having just exterminated most European Jews, the Nazis could have exterminated much more, and all Slavs, etc.

Instead the Greeks fought, as the French had done, ten months earlier. By the time Barbarossa started, the Nazi army was much weakened from what it had been, a year earlier, having lost more than 100,000 of its best elements. (Plus thousands of planes, and better pilots.)

When confronted to French fortifications on the other side of the Meuse, Nazi engineers charged with explosive backpacks, a non-sustainable technique providing with little inspiration; from their point of view, they were going to die, one way, or another, as they were stuck between the river and French guns, so it’s not like, in their minds, at least, they were really the suicide bombers they, in reality, were.

You want peace with killers? Then be ready to die, with all those, and all what you love, and respect. Yet, don’t expect those who are more worthy to follow you.

Reality has no morality. We have morality to adapt to reality. Those whose morality can’t adapt to reality have no future.

Patrice Ayme’

Can Space Be Faster Than Light?

Is space faster than light? The question may sound weird, like comparing apples and red herrings. Yet, it is being asked by serious cosmologists.

Here is Sean Carrol, a famous professional cosmologist from Caltech in his essay: “The Universe Never Expands Faster Than the Speed of Light”: That is intriguing, because it was alleged, long ago that so-called Cosmic Inflation, precisely, allowed the Universe to “expand faster than light”. Carrol:

…”here to get a little nitpick off my chest: the claim that during inflation, the universe “expanded faster than the speed of light.” It’s extraordinarily common, if utterly and hopelessly incorrect. (I just noticed it in this otherwise generally excellent post by Fraser Cain.) A Google search for “inflation superluminal expansion” reveals over 100,000 hits, although happily a few of the first ones are brave attempts to squelch the misconception. I can recommend this nice article by Tamara Davis and Charlie Lineweaver, which tries to address this and several other cosmological misconceptions.”

Notice How Big Bang Expansion Accelerates, Slows Down, Then Re-Accelerate. Twist & Turn?

Well. The varying speed of light model was proposed by Jean-Pierre Petit in 1988 (and copied by John Moffat in 1992, Albrecht and João Magueijo in 1999). Instead of superluminal expansion of space, the speed of light was proposed to be 60 orders of magnitude faster than its current value solving the horizon and homogeneity problems in the early universe…

Even for those who are not interested by cosmological physics and relativity, this is fascinating, because it means that most cosmologists had no idea of what they are talking about, or what other cosmologists are talking about…. Over the last few decades, that their collective cosmological wisdom got sold in tenths of millions of books on the subject.

This means that the making of “science” is considerably less obvious and appealing than the making of sausage. It also means that we have no idea what space, time, and even light, mean.

The reason many of these physicists do not understand, what they are talking about, is that they did not use the more advanced mathematics I will introduce later in an essay.

In “Expanding Confusion: common misconceptions of cosmological horizons and the superluminal expansion of the Universe”, Tamara and Charlie claim that:

“We use standard general relativity to illustrate and clarify several common misconceptions about the expansion of the Universe. To show the abundance of these misconceptions we cite numerous misleading, or easily misinterpreted, statements in the literature. In the context of the new standard Lambda-CDM cosmology we point out confusions regarding the particle horizon, the event horizon, the “observable universe” and the Hubble sphere (distance at which recession velocity = c). We show that we can observe galaxies that have, and always have had, recession velocities greater than the speed of light. We explain why this does not violate special relativity and we link these concepts to observational tests. Attempts to restrict recession velocities to less than the speed of light require a special relativistic interpretation of cosmological redshifts. We analyze apparent magnitudes of supernovae and observationally rule out the special relativistic Doppler interpretation of cosmological redshifts at a confidence level of 23 sigma.”

Before I expose my more advanced mathematics, let me point out this: the Big Bang created this problem, Cosmological Inflation. Cosmological Inflation, if admitted is a huge problem: why did it start? Why did it stop? (Guth himself views the lack of even a glimpse of an explanation here as a problem.) Why is it all over the place? (Physicists such as Linde, an ex-Russian at Stanford, believe in “chaotic inflation”, with inflation all over the place: completely silly? Well maybe not: I have a re-interpretation with Quantum Entanglement!)

A solution to solve the Cosmic Inflation problem is to decapitate the Big Bang. That’s what I do with my proposal of Eternal Dark Energy, the “100 billion years old universe”.

On the face of it, it’s obvious: why to imagine one which makes no sense, when we already have one, for sure, which makes no sense either?

Some things are obvious. Some car makers claimed that their “hybrid” cars went one hundred kilometers on 1.2 liters. A French magazine went out, and measured. It was found hybrid car fuel usage was three times higher than officially announced.

Surprising? No.

Obvious.

Why would a hybrid car going in a straight line at uniform speed use less fuel? Witchcraft? In uniform motion, only the gasoline engine works. The electric engine(s) get dragged along. In truth, the hybrid machinery is heavy and, if anything, the car should use more fuel, no less. As found.

Simple: basic logic is a killer, if no obvious evidence to the contrary.

Patrice Ayme’  

All Animals Equal? Including Brutes?

That All Animals Are Equal, is a most respected philosophy in the USA and other parts where plutocracy reigns. I explain why below.

Philosophy is not innocuous, far from it: it’s how people are ruled. Ruling over others is intrinsically evil. So evil, actually, that baboons, these super aggressive and militarized animals, have diluted rule in three ways. Baboons have two sort of “guides”, the rulers, and the innovators. In a baboon troop between alpha females, alpha males and numerous innovators, few adult baboons are just subjugated.

This makes the present situation of the human species all the more remarkable. We are subjugated. Rousseau said it was because of civilization itself. That was stupid (yet, it led to Nazism and Sovietism). In truth we are subjugated because of particular philosophies. Generally I target the (sort of) wisdom known as Abrahamism (Judeo-Christo-Islamism), because rather rabid citizens in America and the Middle East claim to believe in it enough to bomb others (see invasion of Iraq, etc.).

This French Spider Monster Is Your Equal, Says Princeton

But then there are those philosophies which are a bit more sophisticated in the way they subjugate. The animal rights movements first blossomed under Nazism. Coincident with the rise of plutocracy, and the decay of everything else, this time in the USA, not Germany, it has also blossomed in the USA.

Peter Singer claimed in 1974 that “All Animals are Equal“. This made him extremely famous. He got a prestigious appointment at Princeton University. Many professional “philosophers” throughout the Anglo-Saxon juggernaut claim loudly to view Singer as the “greatest philosopher alive”. I have an adverse interpretation, naturally. Before I come to that, I should expose Singer’s fundamental idea. Let’s quote him extensively, lest I be accused to distort him. (Those who are more interested by what I have to say about them rather than what I view as sophisticated inanities, can hyper-jump after the quote.) Peter Singer wrote:

“I gave reasons for believing that the fundamental principle of equality, on which the equality of all human beings rests, is the principle of equal consideration of interests. Only a basic moral principle of this kind can allow us to defend a form of equality which embraces all human beings, with all the differences that exist between them. I shall now contend that while this principle does provide an adequate basis for human equality, it provides a basis which cannot be limited to humans. In other words I shall suggest that, having accepted the principle of equality as a sound moral basis for relations with others of our own species, we are also committed to accepting it as a sound moral basis for relations with those outside our own species – the nonhuman animals.

This suggestion may at first seem bizarre. We are used to regarding the oppression of blacks and women as among the most important moral and political issues facing the world today. These are serious matters, worthy of the time and energy of any concerned person. But animals? Surely the welfare of animals is in a different category altogether, a matter for old ladies in tennis shoes to worry about. How can anyone waste their time on equality for animals when so many humans are denied real equality?

This attitude reflects a popular prejudice against taking the interests of animals seriously – a prejudice no better founded than the prejudice of white slaveowners against taking the interests of blacks seriously. It is easy for us to criticize the prejudices of our grandfathers, from which our fathers freed themselves. It is more difficult to distance ourselves from our own beliefs, so that we can dispassionately search for prejudices among them. What is needed now is a willingness to follow the arguments where they lead, without a prior assumption that the issue is not worth attending to.

The argument for extending the principle of equality beyond our own species is simple, so simple that it amounts to no more than a clear understanding of the nature of the principle of equal consideration of interests. We have seen that this principle implies that our concern for others ought not to depend on what they are like, or what abilities they possess (although precisely what this concern requires us to do may vary according to the characteristics of those affected by what we do).

It is on this basis that we are able to say that the fact that some people are not members of our race does not entitle us to exploit them, and similarly the fact that some people are less intelligent than others does not mean that their interests may be disregarded. But the principle also implies that the fact that beings are not members of our species does not entitle us to exploit them, and similarly the fact that other animals are less intelligent than we are does not mean that their interests may be disregarded.”

There are so many wrong idea in the preceding quote, which contains all what Singer is famous for in a nutshell, that it’s hard to know where to start. I will keep to the mains (what gives electric shocks, yes).

Notice the preeminence of the word, and concept, of “interest” in Singer’s thought system. This may sound innocuous. It’s not. In Islam (as in Judaism and Christianity) charting interest to a fellow-man is forbidden (haram). I believe in moods.

By making the notion of INDIVIDUAL interest, which is the center, and crux of so-called “capitalism” or so-called “markets”, as in “free markets”, the highest value imaginable, Singer and his accomplices are, not so implicitly, putting “the market” (aka American imperialism), at the very top of the pyramids of all values.

So notice, that if we want no more sexism and raise, Singer says we have to embrace interest, thus markets. Plutocracy shall make you free!

No wonder Singer joined in 2011 the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London, in addition to his work at Princeton. Instead of lashing out, with high taxes on plutocrats, and thus trample their delicate interests, Peter shall strive to prevent their suffering.

After all, plutocrats may be of lesser intelligence than us, yet, we have to respect their interests, because they are animals, and their right to life and no suffering, are primordial..

How come such stupidities have become so famous and respectable? Precisely because they force the philosophically minded, if they want to graduate, to respect stupidity. Thus the mood of abject submission to stupidity is enforced as the highest moral value, and proof of the highest smarts.

Now of course, Singer’s incredibly offensive message is disguised with mould red herrings about (correct) trivialities. Singer’s Key Idea is that equal does not mean the same (who could say otherwise?). Example: one doesn’t have to assign a right to abortion to men in order to assign it to women.

The real issue is the concept of equality. We make a mistake in thinking that it requires equal rationality, says Singer. Singer claims that rights used to be denied to women and non-whites on the grounds of their limited rationality.

To “prove” this, Singer rolls out an example. A woman feminist in England wrote an essay on women deserving equal rights: She pointed out that, just across the Channel, in Paris, a strong attempt had been made to give women the right to vote. A Cambridge philosopher replied by asking if “brutes” also deserved equal rights. That was in 1794. Singer says, then, yes, even brutes have rights.

Women had been fighting for their rights, and getting some, sometimes, for 22 centuries, ever since Roman Pater Familias were deprived of their right to kill their wives.

However Singer exhibits his own limitation: “limited rationality” was an Anglo-Saxon argument: in Antique Rome, there was NO assumption of limited rationality on the ground of difference of origin! Similarly for the successor regime of Rome, France. Racism, race, limited rationality, exclusion are ANGLO-SAXON concepts, enshrined in the congenital slavery of “blacks” (some of whom were white).

As a child I lived in Africa. French speaking Africa (more than 200 million people in Africa ). Once I crossed over into an English speaking African country. To my amazement, I found there were two sets of toilets at the customs. A first set, immaculate, very fancy, for “Ladies and Gentlemen”. In the distance there was another set, rough and disgusting, of a suspicious brownish color, for “Males and Females”. That was my first introduction to racism. (In French Africa, there were only one type of toilets.

When the Franks got to England in 1066 CE, they freed the slaves. They conducted a census: 20% of the population was enslaved. Recently the buried corpse of a Black African was found in England, post Frankish conquest. He was a free man.

Singer’s thesis of deep racism in history is not correct. Rome was NOT racist. The two large empires which made Western civilization, Roma and the Imperium Francorum, believed exactly that. That’s why seven queens of the Franks reigned around 600.

So what is the connection with Nazism? If Nietzsche were here, he would say: nihilism. By claiming that mold, lichen and arthropods have “equal rights”, Singer is trashing the human race, he may as well say cow dung has equal rights.

The Nazis were crafty enough to find that angle well before Singer. Nobody could accuse the Nazis to be inhuman, quite the opposite: they passed strong laws preventing cruelty to animals, and created vast and numerous national parks.

It was all a smokescreen. The interest of Nazis was to kill people, so they could suck their riches, from their hair, to their teeth (!), to the properties they owned before the Nazis stole them.

The solution to Nazism was to inflict on Nazis enough pain, suffering and death, so they will quit by force their pretense to animality.

The rise of plutocracy is directly connected to the mood we have equal right to sheep. No wonder Mr. Singer is well employed.

Patrice Ayme’

Beyond Cynicism, Reason

We have a lot to learn from the history of ideas and moods in Greco-Roman antiquity, and how it was entangled with the history of battles, empires, and the near destruction of civilization. We are clearly in a similar scheme. Except now it’s the biosphere itself, not just civilization, which is in peril. So let’s have no pity for our so-called “leaders”, and those who admire them.

In that light, Diogenes and the mental topology around him ought to be contemplated. The founding cynic Diogenes of Sinope, was of the opinion that people ought to behave more like dogs (or, even, mice). To this, I would add baboons. Understand what moves a baboon, shine a light on the human soul.

In particular, Diogenes’ followers would have sex in public. This was viewed as a much ridiculed oddity at the time. But Diogenes persisted loud and clear, even in the marketplace, responding: “he wished it were as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 46).

Diogenes believed that each individual would either be guided by reason, or, like a domesticated animal, she would be led by a leash. Diogenes, did not despise knowledge per se, but spited pretensions to knowledge which serve only domestication. He had the intuition that the logic of behavior (human and animal) was the master wisdom. And more can be said. Why don’t human beings poop in public? (Aside from “Sun King” Louis XIV, but he was certainly not human.)

A dog has got to do what a dog has got to do. However, the point of human, is that human does not have to do what a dog has got to do. A human ought not to do what a human ought to do: this is the difference with dogs. We are free, free to go against the grain, and that’s all the freedom we have, as free human beings.

Diogenes was labeled mad for acting against convention to the extent he did (allegedly by Plato). To this, Diogenes retorted that conventions often lacked reason: “Most people, are so nearly mad that a finger makes all the difference. For if you go along with your middle finger stretched out, someone will think you mad, but, if it’s the little finger, he will not think so” (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 35).

For Diogenes, reason clearly plays the central role. There is a report that Diogenes “would continually say that for the conduct of life we need the right reason or a halter”.  (Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book 6, Chapter 24). A halter is something one puts around the head of a dog or horse to lead them around. So either the truth will make you free, or you are just cattle. Cattle ready to trample over civilization.

Diogenes’ influence was deep. He started a line of argument which denied motion (it evolved into Zeno’s paradoxes which have caught a second wind with Quantum Physics; Zeno founded the philosophical school known as Stoicism; probably being a stoic was best when subjugated by the “Hellenistic Kingdoms”, the dictatorship Antipater imposed by naval battle).

Diogenes was a harsh critic of Plato, disparaging Plato’s metaphysics and breaking away from theoretical ethics which only justified oligarchy.

“Plato had defined the human being as an animal, biped and featherless, and was applauded. Diogenes plucked a fowl and brought it into the lecture-room with the words, ‘Here is Plato’s human being.’ In consequence of which there was added to the definition, ‘having broad nails’” (LOEP, chap 40).

Diogenes insisted that true human beings lived in accordance with nature. He lit a candle in broad daylight, and proclaimed he was searching for a human being, as so few lived in accordance with nature. Life in accordance with nature made human beings fully rational.

This was indeed true. Plato the chicken let to Aristotle, who was worse: that famed philosopher played a direct role in the destruction of civilization, and why there are still “royals” in England, leading, at least symbolically, the worldwide plutocratic charade.

That Diogenes had an anti-plutocratic bend is clear. He was captured at some  point by pirates (long story), and ended his life in Corinth. Alexander so-called the Great, was thrilled to meet the famous philosopher. The thinker was basking in the sun. ‘Could I do anything for you’, asked Alexander. Diogenes replied to the exterminator of cities and states alike: “You could stand out of my sun”.

Not easily defeated, Alexander tried the rejoinder: “Were I not Alexander, I wish I could be Diogenes”. In answer, Diogenes stared at a pile of bones: “I am looking for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave.”

You have to understand that this was the turning point of civilization in Greco-Roman antiquity: Greek philosophy, at its sharpest, was meeting the fascists, wealthy savage gangsters from the north, the Macedonians, rich from horses and gold mines. Macedonia was the world’s foremost sophisticated military.

Yet, the Greeks, led by Athens and Corinth, had the brains. Alexander, taught by Aristotle, was not too sure where he was standing. In the east was monstrous Persia, a hyperpower made of an archipelago of plutocracies (satrapies).

Alexander was hesitant about which course to follow, clearly. Alexander respected demographically vanishing Sparta, and fully resurgent Athens. Yet he annihilated Thebes (a move that would have helped Athens, actually, had a mild Alexander stuck around). Alexander went on to destroy Persia. He gave up on his attempt to reach the Pacific, after he discovered that India’s kingdoms could defend themselves.

Alexander then died, all too soon (a conquest of Arabia was being prepared). Alexander was perhaps assassinated by Antipater, Aristotle’s estate executor. Antipater, senior even to Alexander, certainly replaced Alexander and encouraged by Aristotle, destroyed Athenian democracy, replacing it by a plutocracy (only the rich could vote).

Antipater and the world Aristotle created, that of monarchies, thereafter ruled for around two millennia (although the Franks allowed small republics here and there, starting with Venice, then Firenze, Genoa, Switzerland, Escartons, Netherlands, etc., the first big break was the French Republic, a full acknowledgment that the Roman Republic was right all along).

Monarchies make no sense: if anything, being just the brain of one, they are dumb and weak against democracies (as the Swiss Canton demonstrated when they rebelled against the (Germanized)Roman empire ). So, for peoples to accept to be subjugated by individuals and their families, one has to make them stupid.

According to Diogenes, nature makes intelligent.

Thus, to reign monarchs (the Roman emperors in this case) had to fight nature and its gods. Switching to the fascist, cruel, demented and jealous Christian god was not enough. One had also to destroy the interface with nature, the body. Making it gross and smelly, reeked with lice and infections, was a good start.

In the fullness of time, the Catholics decided that anything having to do with the body was dirty. Some woman became a saint just because she never washed, and waited for her clothes to rot of as she piled more clothes on top. Her face was black with grime: she was lauded for that.

The Catholics were after the entire mood of the Greco-Roman civilization, and kept at it for more than eleven centuries: when they took the last Muslim kingdom in Grenada, their very fascist, cruel and demented majesties, Isabella of Castille and Ferdinand of Aragon, inventors of the Inquisition in Spain, closed all the 2,000 or so baths therein (disclaimer: an ancestor was ennobled by the Aragon king, 12 centuries ago).

So Diogenes was right: if one wants unreason, behaving unnaturally is a good start.

But now let’s go further than Diogenes: what is the interest of a sharp dichotomy between the public and private spheres? It enforces a morality, a sort of hygiene: just as it is good to wash one hands. Recent studies show that just washing hands would cut down child mortality by 40%, in the most destitute countries  (diarrhea kills more children than all other diseases combined). Symbolically, preserving a private sphere is a king of conceptual washing: it keeps some bodily functions and activities out of the public morality, thus segregates and hence weakens their influence, allowing for a more elevated society, let alone diarrhea free..

Any question?

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

Israel & the China Man

What do Israel and the Chinaman have in common? Fundamental biases dislocating a correct vision of reality which all lemmings ardently share, thus finding themselves very smart.

Once there was an English student in Scotland, enraptured, with his friend Lyell, listening to the discoveries of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck a research professor in Paris’ Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, pertaining to the immense age of the Earth, demonstrated by the evolution of microscopic features in fossilized mollusks (the family of mollusks was defined by Lamarck’s senior competitor, research professor Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier).

Lyell’s, and other geologists’ field studies, mostly in France and Germany, showed indeed that stratigraphy and fossils confirmed Lamarck’s view. Darwin grew up, and later honorably tried to parrot in the Galapagos the work of Lamarck, with turtles and birds. However, the Galapagos are recent (maybe as little as nine million years), so speciation is weak: the birds are so little different, that there is a debate whether some of them are different species. Darwin did not have the good luck of Lamarck, studying really different, and extremely numerous mollusks.

In any case, the British Empire, in its wisdom, realized that Jesus Christ was becoming less of a bedrock of  the splendor of said empire, so it switched to Darwin, proclaiming him the creator of evolution, and thus multiplying further the aura of the British ways. It worked: the head of state of Canada is still the Queen of England.

Trudeau: My Son Will Learn From Me How To Manipulate The Stupid Out There

In related news, China gave the “Confucius Prize” to the dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe has reigned over the country for 35 years. This makes sense: Confucius was all for oligarchy, not to say plutocracy, as these regimes brought (apparent) peace. Confucianism as the default mode of China has been its main problem for twenty-six hundred years: the same family is in charge of Confucius for 26 centuries. Mao understood this, and that is why he used as an excuse to launch his “Cultural Revolution”.

But back to that other pillar of empire, Darwin. Darwin had decided that man came out of Africa, so that truth having been established, as Charles had replaced Jesus, it has been repeated ever since. The fact that there was no proof, it was even better, as it was an occasion to cultivate the celebrity/superstitious muscle. Celebrity and superstition go well together, as both assume that concept or creatures who cannot be observed, are up there, and to be “believed” in. Cultivating one or the other pertains to the same mood, so they reinforce each other.

It’s harder to find fossils in China. The climate tends to be much wetter than in Africa, and cycles of great heat and deep freezing, in the north, are not friendly to delicate corpses, either. However:

Teeth from China Reveal an Early Human Trek out of Africa

“Stunning” find shows that Homo sapiens reached Asia around 100,000 years ago. [Nature, October 14, 2015.]

These 47 human teeth, dated to 80,000-120,000 years ago, were found in a limestone cave system in Daoxian, China. Those teeth from a cave in south China show that Homo sapiens reached China around 100,000 years ago—a time at which most researchers had assumed that our species had not trekked far beyond Africa.

“This is stunning, it’s major league,” says Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK who was not involved in the research. “It’s one of the most important finds coming out of Asia in the last decade.”

The teeth are unquestionably those of H. sapiens, says María Martinón-Torres, a palaeoanthropologist at University College London who co-led the study with colleagues Wu Liu and Xie-jie Wu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. Their small size, thin roots and flat crowns are typical for anatomically modern humans—H. sapiens—and the overall shape of the teeth is barely distinguishable from those of both ancient and present-day humans..

The team used calcite deposits, stratigraphy, and Uranium and Thorium datation methods.

“This demonstrates it was not a failed dispersal,” says Petraglia, who has long argued for an early expansion of modern humans through Asia on a southerly route. “This is a rock-solid case for having early humans—definitely Homo sapiens—at an early date in eastern Asia.”

Why were they Homo Sapiens Sapiens in China for 50,000 years, at least, before they appeared in Europe? Simple: stronger, smarter Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis were in the way.

That Homo would thrive in Asia is not surprising: it represents a huge amount of inhabitable warmish land. More such land than in Africa arguably. Neanderthals also occupied North Africa, so the Sapiens Sapiens would have had to sneak through. Maybe they did not sneak through, because Sapiens Sapiens is just the tropical variant of Homo, so was represented on both sides of the tropics equally. As I argued, once Neanderthals wore pants, .they may as well go tropical too, and revert to the more delicate, smaller, thus more prolific version of Sapiens.

In any case, this shows that turning scientists into gods is an insult to science: Einstein had no reason to believe in local reality, except that he had been conditioned (= fabricated) that way. The Einstein-robot just repeated mechanically what he knew by rote about reality. Fine. What’s not fine, was to make that into a religion. Same for some of Darwin’s pronouncements.

Some will say that’s just science, and surely politics don’t make the same mistake. Yet a beautiful example is the case of Israel. Netanyahu dared to go outside of official script, by pointing out that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a sort of Muslim Pope, took part in the extermination of the Jews. This is factually true.

Yet as all the deepest truths of World War Two, it’s no good to proffer it, if all you want is peace, in your little world, or, more exactly, torpor.

So what of Israel? Exasperated by Jewish rebellions which turned into full blown wars which killed many legionnaires, Rome outlawed Israel, threw the Jews out, and called the place Palestina.

225 years later, the philosopher-emperor, Julian, having studied in Athens and been elected in Paris, decided that the punishment had lasted long enough, and ordered the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and the return of the Jews. However Julian got killed, and replaced by Christian fanatics even worse than the ones before.

So here we are.

The “Two-States” solution will never work (long story). The facts, on the ground, is that Israel is not just occupying, colonizing, but invading the “West Bank” (60% of it).Denying this, and that the forces at work are so colossal, they can’t be stopped, is being a partisan of the present situation, the slow eating of Palestine by the Israeli boa.

What’s the only solution which can work? The One-State solution: one state, secular, rights of all critters, respected. That is the Israeli government has to respect the human rights of minorities.

Meanwhile Ivory Coast voted for president, for the economist turned president who had been barred, after being PM, from the Ivorian citizenship (for having not all his ancestors Ivorian). Ouattara got to power, thanks to some judiciously placed French rockets which landed his all too dictatorial predecessor in jail.

Some grumbled it all reminds them of “France-Afrique”, the connection between business interests, and the military help France provides with. Yes, sure, but as with Darwin or Israel, one has to look at reality: “France-Afrique” is bad, but the alternatives,  USA Africa or Africa, Idi Amin Dada, or Mugabe style, are worse roads to plutocracy.

France cannot keep on making war on the behalf of all Europe, plus civilization, without finding a way to pay for it. And the same holds even for the much richer USA.

Canada elected heir, and hair apparent, Trudeau son of Trudeau (see above) has promised many things, including the Keystone Pipeline, something that not even Obama supports (Keystone is an attempt to make Canada even more filthy rich from filthy oil tar, while melting the permafrost up north). Weirdly, everybody is applauding, although, not satisfied with smothering the biosphere, Justin Trudeau has made many pro-Islamist utterances (the way he sees it, it just brings him votes).

Training to recognize reality can be done best in science, but what is learned has to be brought to politics. If you want progress, for real, stick to truth, for real.

Patrice Ayme’

Transgender, Transreal, & How Pluto Profits

I am very transgender in mentality. In both directions, of course. Whatever that exactly means. I also know that gender is a matter of an hormonal landscape, in which chromosome identity (XX, XY, XXY, etc.) is only one factor. However, that does not mean I throw reality out of the window.

Humanity is steering the planet, towards oblivion. The obvious cause is that we are led by greedy, clownish “leaders” who masquerade as “elected”. In truth, they are not leading, they are just middle-men who hope to make a good “career” by pleasing the masters, like the butlers they are.

Yet the situation is worse than it looks. Consider the middle Middle Ages. The European Middle Ages, but I could adjust the same discourse to the Indian, Chinese, or Japanese Middle Ages. Europe is a clearer, better known case. It was a time of princesses, princes, and devotion to the Christian god. As Sade, Nietzsche, and various mafiosi observed, it was just the opposite: the European aristocracy was barely more than the largest organized crime operation in the world, and the wars it organized, a way to physically and mentally divided the people they subjugated into minced meat (when truly necessary).

Agnes Sorel Forced Charles VII To Make War, Or She Would Bed The English King Instead, As Eleanor Did.

Wedding the English king after divorcing the French king is what Eleanor, Duchesse d’Aquitaine had done earlier, and had many children. All subsequent English and French monarchs were her descendants for generations.

What was wrong with the Middle Ages?

The mood. This veneration of people such as Eleanor.

The “Christian” mood of the populace, the fake-Christian, hysterical mood of the leaders. The mood, superstitious and full of tribal anger (consider the pogroms against Jews, Cathars, Waldenses/Protestants, “witches”; and the crisscrossing of Europe by war parties and related “grandes companies” and other armies of brigands).

The superstitious mood is entangled by the celebrity mood, and both are adverse to the triumph of wisdom. The celebrity mood made people look up to princes and princesses (the word, originally used when the Roman Republic was dying, comes from “princeps”, first, and Augustus loved it).

Germaine Greer once at the edge of feminism, is now condemned as somebody so bad by a tribe so well-organized, a university she was supposed to talk at, implied that she should not be allowed to speak in public (as they will not insure her safety). The loudly “transgender” pseudo-tribe has condemned Greer. And, as usual, there is the public discourse, and the real one I suspect (below).

In Reality Greer Attacked The Celebrities Paid To Attack Reality, The Kadarshians

[In the USA, everything is bigger, compare with the “Dame de Beaute'”, the Fifteenth Century Agnes Sorel, above. And Kim Kadarshian is the specialist of reality, or so you will find, Rollingstone asserts, once you enter her real world…]

Tribalism is the way out of metaphysical loneliness. One advantage of “careers” is that they manufacture tribalism. An advantage of hostility strongly shared, let alone mass hatred, is that it creates a fake world solved by tribalism, and the tribal cement to go with.

Witness what is going on in Israel/Palestine. The best solution there is a global secular republic (or union) containing two states therein (a bit like the European Union model).

Chris Snuggs: ““philosophy” means “love of knowledge”, which has actually little to do with what philosophers do. What today is “science” was once “philosophy”. What today’s philosophy is is basically “speculation about the nonscientific” or ” speculative musing about the meaning of life and the processes of thought and its expression through language.””

Patrice: “Linguistic” philosophy has grown malignant indeed. Yet, philosophy, the philosophical method, is more needed than ever, and that is exactly why it is more dead than ever in the plutocratic system, and its universities. There, what passes for philosophy is all too often just garbage.

Watch what I said about the importance of moods. I am applying the philosophical method: telling the truth, sticking to reality. Mood calculus includes, crucially, the unsaid, and unexpressed.

The deepest questions at the edge of science, from Lamarckism to what it means when galaxies recess faster than light, or whether high energy physicists know what they are talking about, involve state of the art philosophy.

However, indeed, Chris, what’s often taught in philosophy departments is abysmal, indeed. This has to do with the fact that it takes (say) a decade to study all of science at high enough a level beyond high school, to have a fair idea of the scientific landscape.

Society, let alone universities, do not view this sort of global knowledge as valuable. Plato required the equivalent of a graduate level knowledge of mathematics. Nearly all “philosophers” now don’t know anymore calculus than Trudeau, Cameron, Hollande, Putin, Xi, Roussef, or Obama.

But of the degeneracy of philosophy has to do with the rise of “analytic philosophy” in Anglo-Saxon countries. Russell, its founder found it had become thoroughly unworthy. On the continent, the derangement was due to the rise of fascism (Soviet or Mussolini style).

What did the veteran feminist, Ms Greer say, which supposedly infuriated some transgender fanatics?

“I just don’t think that surgery turns a man into a woman. A perfectly permissable view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don’t really know what women are and I think that a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it’s not something I welcome.”

Surgery, as practiced today, is little different from what the best prehistoric doctors did successfully: amputation. OK, in the future, we will grow organs. It is studied. It is the future. But not yet a fact.

Kim Kadarshian seems to believe that reality, or rather, learning how to rape reality, is her business model. Said she, talking about her transgender, surgery challenged step-father, now a pseudo-woman:

“He lives his life the way he wants, a really authentic life, and he was like, ‘If you can’t be authentic and you can’t live your life, what do you have?’”

You want authenticity? Ask the Kadarshians, they know all about it. They accept plastic, any day.

Germaine Greer has accused TV star Caitlyn Jenner of emulating the limelight of other (female) members of the Kadarshians family.

The Australian-born feminist courted controversy by asserting that “misogyny played a big part” in the rumors that Glamour magazine would give Jenner its woman of the year award.

Jenner, who was born Bruce, and got many Olympic medals as a male, was married to Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian’s mother, until they filed for divorce early last year, and cannot get enough of his celebrity status, apparently.

Greer says that so-called transgender women, who, admittedly, began life as males, before undergoing surgery and hormone treatments to “become women”, are “not women”. Greer says that they do not “look like, sound like or behave like women”. Instead they behave as males who want to steal everything from women, including femininity. So they trample not just on reality, but on justice too.

Clearly those transgender creatures, not to say creations, are not females (that requires XX chromosomes). But to pretend that they are females, because some people just said so, is the effect the owners of the Main Stream Media, all very rich men, are after: namely destroy any common sense, and make a religion out of that destruction.

Not to say that attack against reality are only the work of transgender crazies. Giving the Nobel Prize to drone crazy Obama was not just funny, but unreal. And not that this was started yesterday. Among the pious, ever since Viceroy Lord Mountbatten said so, Gandhi has been viewed as a paragon of pacifism. Never mind that pacifist Gandhi, praying like an Hindu, helped to bring colossal, multi-generational, religious strife, 15 million refugees, & millions dead. (No wonder he got depressed.)

Christianism to is a religion of peace and love, especially regarding Cathars (exterminated), Jews (pogromized), Muslims (roasting their children a must when hungry, see the First Crusade), or any sort of intellectuals or printers (burned alive). And Joan of Arc, the one of the same king as Agnes Sorel, of course saved France, or so pseudo-French fanatics, by re-igniting a war with London which lasted another four centuries with real guns, and which France is still busy losing, to this day…

Reality is a hard mistress, and the one which always wins. Yet, we control it, to a great extent now, because we are the nonlinear species, ready, even mandated, for immortality. Not that we have a choice.  Humanity is the “why” species. Also the “no” species. Yes, no and why, for the God(s), incarnated, for real. And the problem the gods have is whether they want to aspire to grab Kim’s fake reality, or stick to exercising our reality muscles.

Patrice Ayme’

Aging Is A Disease. To Improve Wisdom, Fight It.

The Food & Drugs Administration does not think of aging as a disease. However the FDA only allows to test drugs which potentially fight a disease. One disease. Just one disease. This has practical consequences: the FDA cannot authorize testing drugs which would combat aging. Since, according to the FDA, aging is not a disease.

I disagree. Philosophically considered, aging is obviously a disease. On the face of it, dis-ease means one is not at ease anymore. Not only is aging  a reduction of comfort: watch old people bent over, shrunk, transpierced by various pains related to all sorts of inflammations. Moreover nearly all diseases which affect people, and are ultimately impossible to treat are age related. But, moreover, clearly, aging is not comfortable:

Brigitte Bardot In Her 20s, & More recently: If That’s Not A Disease, What Is? Aging Is A Disease, Like Elephantiasis

The FDA’s position is arguably the greatest obstacle to progress in health care. Why? If aging is not a disease, and no drug can be developed to cure this non-disease, most diseases known will not be treated, as most diseases are age-related: when people are in their prime, say between 25 and 45 years of age, they are pretty much disease free.

Theories of how aging proceeds exist. They are not complete, but they fit well with the plausible modes of action of the five substances which are known to have anti-aging effects.

Some will philosophically object to the desire of having people live 1,000 years or so. However, suppose people did. It would be then very easy to persuade people to save the biosphere from the Greenhouse Gas catastrophe.

The one billion people living within 10 meter elevation from the sea would not appreciate to see their properties flooded within a small fraction of their lifetimes. Indeed, it’s pretty much guaranteed that sea level will go up tens of meters in a few centuries, displacing billions of people. Such a displacement of population will bring huge wars, and misery, among other problems.

Thus with long lives will come a better stewardship of the planet.

Some have dared to idiotically proffer that we would not want to live that long. Well, I am all for voluntary euthanasia: let them idiots and people of little appreciation die, that will help the biosphere. And it will help the ambiance too: who wants people in such a bad mood, with a jaundiced attitude to life, sticking around? Would not they start wars, just to get out of their colossal ennui?

Not fighting aging is tantamount to calling death a necessary calling, short-term, of the human experience. It’s nearly tantamount to approving of young people dying in war. It’s the reign of the philosophy of the Dark Side posing as Enlightened.

Ageing as something to be respected has to be disposed of, be it just to improve the philosophical mood of humanity.

Patrice Ayme’

Non-Linear Us

Nature is not nature, ever since there are humans, and they think. Earth has been terraformed, made into a garden, a human garden, in the last few million years. By ours truly.

Neanderthals started to used coal (lignite), 80,000 years ago.They also domesticated (that is, modified) European wolves, and invested in real estate, by exterminating Cave Bears.

Thus, following “nature” is a non-linear activity, as, by following nature, we also follow the new nature we deconstructed and rebuilt, that is, we follow ourselves.

Linearity Is The Penultimate Mathematical Simplification

The simplest thing is to view all causes as constant. The next simplification is to view them as linear. After that quadratic, cubic, and all powers etc… The exponential, an infinite sum of powers with fast decreasing coefficients, grows as fast, at any point, as its own value. So it’s all over nature.

“Following nature” thus does not just mean hugging trees. It also means dealing with trees the old fashion way: cutting and burning them, to favor plants and animals human beings were involved with (fires in Indonesia are contributing at least one gigaton of carbon to the atmosphere in 2015, making them an appreciable source of CO2). “Following nature” also means using genetic engineering on plants and beasts alike.

Nature has been artificial from even before the rise of civilization. Prehistoric men in Europe already conducted advanced and successful surgeries, from trepanations, to amputations, complete with anesthetics and antibiotics (parts of that knowledge got completely forgotten during the European Middle Ages… to this day!) “Facts” nowadays are all what influences humans, because they, in turn, change nature. Including hopes, systems of mood (“austerity!”, “Islam!”).

The fundamental calculus assigned to (say) Stoics, is the fundamental calculus of humanity. To mostly quote Massimo P’s “New Stoicism, Part IV”:

“physics” (i.e., natural science and metaphysics), “logic” (i.e., logic, epistemology and psychology), and “ethics” (i.e., ethics)… the first two are instrumental to the third one: one cannot decide how to live (the proper domain of ethics) if one doesn’t know how to reason well (logic) and doesn’t also know whatever we can know about the reality of nature (physics). This implies that whenever our understanding of physics changes we need to update our beliefs accordingly, and then examine (via the use of logic) whether and to what extent that also affects our ethics.”

Human evolution discovered, so to speak, this virtuous spiral of understanding and behaving. The species modified itself accordingly, it became that spiral. it is now more energetic than ever.

One cannot read morality straight out of scientific facts, because facts are about the world, and the world is about what we constructed. Thus the calculus of human hope, desire and risk evaluation has to be factored in… And it keeps on changing, the more it reflects on the agitated waters of its darkest soul.

Fundamentally, then, the human species is immensely adaptative (see future Martians): to act, human agents consider human minds, and what their activities wrought (nature). We can call ourselves new names, but our new game is the same as our old game: changing the rules as we see fit, the more we learn, and the more we change nature.

There is no general theory of non-linear mathematics. How could there be? It would be as having a theory of us. Yet we are all about the changes we decide. And how do we decide? This is not an obvious question, it has hounded fundamental physics, ever since the EPR paper of 1935. It is so non-obvious that it is the last loophole to check in the Non-Local aspect of the universe. See the New York Times, October 21, 2015: “Sorry, Einstein. Quantum Study Suggests ‘Spooky Action’ Is Real.”

To quote from there: “the National Science Foundation has financed a group of physicists led by Dr. Kaiser and Alan H. Guth, also at M.I.T., to attempt an experiment that will have a better chance of ensuring the complete independence of the measurement detectors by gathering light from distant objects on different sides of the galaxy next year, and then going a step further by capturing the light from objects known as quasars near the edge of the universe in 2017 and 2018.”

Translation: our presumed influence on the universe is so vast, subtle and pernicious, that quasars apparently receding much faster than the speed of light, are called to the rescue of physicists who want to make sure they reach beyond man, to an unspoiled universe.

We are everywhere we look, at least in our terrestrial neighborhood. Everywhere we reach, human influence has already changed everything. It’s not just about the melting icecaps.

Patrice Ayme’

How Tribal Evolution Brought Present Masochism

Ancient Mental Structures From Tribalism Foster Present Day Masochism Imposed By The Wealthy:

Humanity is fundamentally tribal. A tribe is a number of humans, say fifty. Enough to scare off, and kill, a sufficient numbers of predators. Not enough to tax the land so much, one could live off it.

Predation is something hard to imagine nowadays (and yet, ironically enough we are becoming victims of it again!) For tenths of millions of years of human evolution, before an alliance could be made with wolves, human beings were in a constant war with super predators. The notion of super predator is the stuff of legend. Why? Because humans eliminated most of therm in the last 50,000 years (around the date when Neanderthals exterminated the giant European Cave Bear).

California Scene, 15,000 Years Ago: Smilodon Not Smiling For 4 meter Tall, One Ton Arctodus

Eurasia and the Americas enjoyed their respective lions, at least 25% larger than today’s largest African lions. Homotherium (Eurasia), and Smilodon (America) were saber tooth cats, the latter was huge. The path into America was probably barred by the extremely carnivorous, lion faced Short Faced Bear, Arctodus Simus, represented above, who probably ran down bisons and horses (it was made for running). Standing, Arctodus reached four meters tall. Smilodons hunted in packs, and where altruistic (they fed their crippled brethren). California also enjoyed the American Lion, and its own heavy, non-hibernating version of the grizzly bear.

Giant hyenas and giant baboons prowled in Africa. A super giant, three meter tall sort of gorilla in Asia. And so on. The jungle, forest, taiga and tundra was incomparably more dangerous than now. For millions of years.

Human beings evolved in fear, finding safety only in numbers and military discipline. Fascist obedience behind rulers was a life-saver during millions of years. Those life-saving psychological charascteristics probably evolved into an instinct (a natural neurological pattern for human beings).

I call this the fascist instinct. Religions, superstitious or not, the madness of crowds, hyper nationalism, blind obedience to orders, lynching, all come from this natural human tendency to mob the enemy.

In particular, there is in human being a natural tendency to be subjugated, scared, so as to all unite in the terror of the moment.  Politicians exploit it. This tendency is no doubt at work in the rise of the present plutocracy, and the revered myth that we don’t have the means to serve our Lords, except if we engage in more austerity, and subjugation to the laws of the market (that is, the laws of those who had the capital to start with, often obtained by hook and by crook).

We live in strange times, when the real issues are blocked by a mess of red herrings and other irrelevant stuff. Contemplate the so-called “gluten allergy” (disclaimer: I have myself celiac disease). Gluten, a catch-all word for a number of proteins, is the major constituent of wheat, barley, and rye.  It is formed by the interaction of gliadin and glutenin proteins. Corn also contains related proteins called “corn gluten”. These proteins enabled civilizations, starting in the Middle East where they evolved by natural and artificial selection, and in Mesoamerica, where corn was literally created by human genetic engineering.

Now we are told those proteins, at the root of civilization, well tolerated for 500 generations, are poisonous. And people worry about this, frantically… Instead of the poisons and general denutrition agro-alimentary plutocracy has found convenient to stuff food with. People need enemies to feel united, but they are careful to not take plutocracy itself head-on. Just as prehistoric man could not take Arctodus head on, in the beginning.

Ultimately, Arctodus, having blocked the Americas for three million years, was defeated.

We don’t have that kind of time.

Patrice Ayme’

Politics By Representatives Is Inhuman.

The lack of integrity of the “representative” politicians “we” elect now is intrinsic. The process itself creates the lack of integrity. Politics is intrinsically about multiple, fractured personalities, saying, and superficially doing, whatever people (have been made to believe they) want.

Integrity means in one piece. Namely one has just one personality, one character, one psychology, one system of mind, one system of thought, one system of emotion. Practically, the emotions one exhibits are exactly those one has.

Whereas the essence of the modern politician is to present a public persona that can be sold, and has nothing to do with who they truly are, what they truly believe, what motivates them.

Six Foot Two, Telegenic, 30 Years After His Dad The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

I of course supports many of the aims of Justin Trudeau, the new Canadian PM. Yet, being led by a New Man, son of the Old Man (and thus, not at all a New Man, in the Roman sense of the term!) is no real progress.

Canada fell deep in the abyss. Seeing the light again, after falling in the abyss, does not a paradise make.

The ecological policies of high CO2 emission countries (Australia, Canada, USA) are nothing short of criminal on the largest imaginable scale, that of melting icecaps.

Analogies have long been made between humans and wolves (Homo homini lupus: man is a wolf for man… and reciprocally, added the French comic Coluche). Another tendency is believe dogs are, somehow, a “species” we could emulate. Yet, dogs are not really a species. Dogs gives a false impression: we don’t know how stable dogs are, as a species. After all, dogs are the product of artificial selection. In the wild, dogs can be very nasty. I knew some geologists who got attacked, in Iran, by four wild dogs (domesticated doggies returned to the wilds). The geologists had to kill them one by one, with geological hammers, to not finish as canine dinner.

Dogs come from European wolves. American wolves have been studied in the wild, especially in Yellowstone (because scientists wanted to study the ecological impact of their return, which turned out to be considerable). The “alpha” position is stable, until the next mayhem. Researchers were aghast to find the alpha female they beloved dying of her wounds in a ditch, after she had been replaced from her previous executive position.

In many primates, it is true that leadership tends to be hereditary (through moms’ influences). Comparing wolves and advanced primates help us guess that human are ethologically made for rather pacific, democratic, leadership. This conclusion is accentuated by recent research on baboons: decisions where to forage tend to be taken by “initiators” (who are not particularly “alpha”), It is also implied by the small sexual dimorphism in the human species.

This is all important, because it means our present political system, which is more similar to lupine society, is not adapted to our genetic heritage. The latter did not arise just by happenstance, either. It is a consequence of the rise of intelligence. We became democratic, because we needed that, collective thinking and debate, to become more intelligent.

Thus present world political organization is evil in the deepest sense, and contradicts human nature, also in the deepest sense. We truly are imposed EVIL RULE (Pluto Cracy) not the rule of conversation, debate and thinking, the essence of humanity.

As a a noun integrity came to mean, “adherence to moral and ethical principles; soundness of moral character; honesty.” This interpretation is derivative from the original sense, literally un-touched. That came then to mean both “whole” (entier in French), and integer (also entier in French). The original meaning is important to understand that the essence of immorality has long been perceived to be double faced, or worse.

(I often use etymology. Not to tell me what words mean on the surface but how the wisdom of the ages conferred to them what they are. It is related to the “Sum Over Histories” of Quantum Mechanics.)

How to gat out of all this?

New men are nothing, but more of the same old crime. We have to call upon a new process, DIRECT DEMOCRACY.

Geeks swimming in their new noise, claim the Internet will change everything. No, it does not. Not yet. It will, when people can directly DEBATE, and vote, in plebiscites, using the Internet. As the noun indicates, plebiscites, when the plebs directly voted, were already known in Republican Rome. But they were hard to organize, just as they were hard to organize in democratic Athens (where they were required).

The average Athenian farmer needed a day trip to get to the Athenian Assembly. Now the Internet will allow us to vote with a simple click.

And what of the excess of Athens’ National Assembly of the People? Just youthful troubles: similar troubles did not happen during the centuries of Republican rule in Rome.

Moreover, we presently have huge political structures full of professional politicians. They will not disappear overnight. Just as in Switzerland now, they will persist, giving us plenty of safety during the transition from the dictates of the oligarchs, to the People Rule (Demo Cracy).

Patrice Ayme’