How To Alleviate Fake Media Censorship Through Public Utility Legislation

The problem of “fake news” cannot be disjointed from censorship and propaganda… Censoring the truth, or replacing it by lies is not very different. The solution to this steering of the public mind into subjugation is to recognize quality thinking and information as “PUBLIC UTILITY”… From the Google-Facebook duopoly, to the most modest websites, as yours truly (legislatively enforced). That means, dear New York Times, and various university professor sites, no more censorship… 

In a few hours, I was censored three times, twice related to Nobel, not so noble, Paul Krugman, the self-described “Conscience of a Liberal”, and his network. More sad than infuriating. 

I had sent to Paul Krugman a pretty neutral piece for his  post “The Force of Decency Awakens”. Krugman claimed that the same emotion, decency, waking up, was the root cause for the renewed fight against sexism, and against guns. Decency comes from the present participle of decere “to be fitting or suitable“. Krugman apparently found my comment unsuitable and inappropriate. However that comment was purely about how and why plutocracy grew and how that related to indecency. My comment actually supported what Krugman said, it understood it, it stood under it. Krugman should have been happy to be understood, with not one word against him. But, no, he censored my comment nevertheless (someone at the NYT told me Krugman censors me personally). When Krugman does this, I am always baffled: does he really not understand, or does he censors me because he is afraid of the shareholders of his employers (some of the world’s wealthiest men), or is he simply jealous like the wicked queen was of Snow White?

In his post, Krugman pontificated that:”Political scientists have a term and a theory for what we’re seeing on #MeToo, guns and perhaps more: “regime change cascades.””

 The link was looking at only four revolutions, and asked for big money to go beyond the abstract. I smelled a rotten fish. I looked at that site.  It claims: “REMARQ is a collaboration network from RedLink, designed for researchers and qualified users.” “Qualified users?” I sent a comment. The “Remarq Team” looked at the title of my Aristotle Destroyed Democracy essay (I was electronically informed) and, within minutes, sent me something that got plastered on  my browser: “The Remarq team rejected your qualified user request and comment on article Regime Change Cascades: What We Have Learned from the 1848 Revolutions to the 2011 Arab Uprisings. 2018-02-27 14:37”. To be “rejected” by a “team” sounds more abusive than polite.

The theme of ADD is that the respect for Aristotle’s political work is the respect for monarchy, the rule of one. Aristotle’ s main political idea constitutes the bottom principles of today’s political “science”: a few individuals (generally male) should lead We The People, as if we were sheep. This is not idle talk, and a claim Aristotle was a bad influence: Aristotle was actually the leader and mentor of the small group of vicious men who launched the Hellenistic Regimes (which later encouraged the destruction of the Republican spirit in Rome).

The idea of the rule of one, monarchy, defended at the highest intellectual level, is, of course, also the main idea of Judeo-Christo-Islamism, with its big boss, God (which not coincidentally grew with the Hellenistic regimes). Attacking Aristotle, for those who believe in the Guide Principle (Deutsch: Führerprinzip) is like attacking Allah for the worst Jihadists.  Most intellectual professionals paid for their mental work are there to enforce the established order, they do now what the church used to do in the Middle Ages. To rule over minds, one will find more efficient to rule the souls, rather than to wield chains. Here the opinion of Paul Nizan about paid intellectuals, paid to have the correct thoughts and feelings, the watchdogs:

Those whom the establishment feeds wear a chain around their necks, a fable of Aesop already

One difference between someone like me or Nizan (who lived in the Middle East, Europe, Africa) and the political scientists at the “Remarq Team” (who presumably didn’t grew up nor lived in such places) is that I am not paid to tell lies, lies are not what Nizan or I, profess… As paid condottiere of things intellectuals presumably are (why else would they think it is important that others do NOT see my thoughts? If they are so bad, why don’t they rot by themselves?) This observation is not new: since ever, intellectuals have been paid as “watchdogs” (to use Paul Nizan’s expression; Nizan, a friend of Sartre, enlisted in the French army to fight Nazism. Nizan died in combat at Dunkirk, 23 May 1940, part of the enormous French army protecting the evacuation of 330,000 elite soldiers, including most of the professional British army (future instructors to the mass army they would teach), against the entire, vengeful Nazi army. 

What is clear is that a lot of people are spending a lot of efforts censoring the Internet. The NYT censored my comment on the Krugman essay referred above.  

A physicist specialized in Dark Matter censored my comment on Dark Matter, on her site (not the first time!) although the idea I have been pushing is incredibly simple (thus potentially revolutionary). Whereas people like that physicist are pushing MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, I am pushing MOQ (MOdified Quantum; which I also call Sub Quantum Patrice Reality, an allusion to the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation, and its ilk are NOT real…).

A good reason for not having MOND is that, modifying gravitational mass, as MOND de facto does, opens the can of worms of having to modify inertial mass, and, if not, why not… Whereas MOQ/SQPR fills in a gap in the usual Copenhagen Interpretation and its ilk (the other way to solve the gap is the Many Worlds/Multiverse, in other words, angels on a pin, with no limits, whatsoever…) As an exchange on the comments of the Dwarf Galaxy disk problem (predicted by MOQ/SQPR, not by MOND, nor LambdaCDM…) shows, my comment was finally published. It made an analogy between the present situation and the epicycles (an old point of view of mine now adopted by many physicists)… But I am going in much more details. The epicycles’ theory was a consequence of the wrong, ridiculously wrong, Aristotelian physics, at the root, and it may well be what is going on now… Buridan resuscitated heliocentrism, because, first, he got the physics right (also heliocentrism was obvious…)

Delaying comments destroy the debate: the New York Times delayed my comments, by several days, systematically, for years: that allowed the NYT to claim it practiced no censorship (in correspondence with me)… although nobody would read them, then… and then the NYT decided to just censor ALL of my comments, for years. My point is that this sort of steering of public opinion should be illegal, in a public utility (see below)…

I am used to something paradoxical for whom has never been employed by academia (I have ONLY been employed by academia), the scholar as a thief. I was, bad luck, next to some of the greatest, most decorated thieves ever, one of them was one of my best friends (until I discoverer to my horror and depression that he was a thief… There were pages on his thievery at some point in the New York Times; not only he helped then to demolish my career, but he demolished the career of the famous G. Perelman… Perelman got the top prizes in mathematics, refused to accept them, as he said that, then, he would have to tell the truth, and the world of top math would be revealed as the BS it is. Then an angry and discouraged Perelman gave up math (contrarily to repute, math is a social activity; can’t do it when the people you talk to are, you know, thieves, among other problems…).

I had this problem with Black Holes: I suggested, long ago, that the standard reasoning was insufficient because it neglected Quantum effects (say Quark stars, etc.) Now this point of view is standard wisdom.

Thievery is a general problem in research, in a time of insufficient budgets. I have known the detailed case of junior researchers (not just yours truly) seeing their papers rejected, and then senior “peer reviewers” running away with the ideas… which they had just rejected for publication. Greed is not just a plutocratic problem, nor does plutocracy necessarily have to do with making billions. Verily, the power (kratos) of evil (Pluto) is great… especially when directed at honest to goodness thinkers.

Strange world. A tweet of mine, relating to the Bernie Sanders’ Twitter account, was also “made unavailable”. What did my tweet say? Here it is: “Problem: Democrats view as too left-wing the taxes advocated by Carnegie, the USA’s first billionaire (19th Century)! Carnegie explained in detail why it was necessary to tax enormous wealth enormously. The only deep reason for taxation is to prevent hyper wealth accumulation!” https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/965670396715511809 …

Am I too left-wing for Bernie? Or, more to the point, is Carnegie now too left-wing for the Democrats and US “Socialists”? Anyway, my tweet was removed by the powers that be (such a dangerous tweet, I agree!) At least Senator Bernie Sanders just changed his position on some guns… Tweeted Bernie, 2/28/2018:

“We should not be selling assault weapons in this country. These weapons are not for hunting. They are military weapons for killing human beings.” I replied @BernieSanders:

Hillary Clinton used to complain that Bernie Sanders sided with the NRA. Glad to see the clear statement against military assault weapons..(See? Even Hillary can be right sometimes…)

The Internet is big money nowadays: 73% of the advertising revenue in media goes to the duopoly of Google and Facebook (up from 63% in 2015… and 85% of the growth in said revenue). So, we have, de facto, a monopoly of two! By itself, this should impel governments to act (well, OK, they are acting by doing nothing…)

And what do many Internet agents do? Steer, censor and contrive. Indeed, neither Google nor Facebook create content, they are content to steer We The Sheeple towards their idea of decency. They are electronic leeches. 

It is clear that none of this is innocent. what is happening on the Internet is exactly, on a much grander scale, what Putin is accused of doing: a few individuals and their obsequious servants, manipulating public opinion. So what to do?

***

Remedy: The Notion Of Public Utility Medium:

Public utilities provide an infrastructure necessary to society. They are subject to public control, beyond that of standard private industry. In the case of media on the Internet, the infrastructure would be the most important infrastructure of all, the infrastructure of truth!

As it is, there is a serious problem. As David Chavern has it in the WSJ in “Protect the News From Google and Facebook“: “A partial exemption from antitrust laws would help publishers and readers (Feb. 25, 2018):  The news business is suffering, but not because people don’t want news. They do—more than ever. The problem is that the money generated by news audiences flows mostly to Google and Facebook , not to the reporters and publishers who produce excellent journalism… newspaper advertising revenue fell from $22 billion in 2014 to $18 billion in 2016 even as web traffic for the top 50 U.S. newspapers increased 42%.

Local news is most at risk. As print circulation declines, community news publishers have the hardest time adapting to the ever-changing demands of Facebook and Google algorithms… Tech savvy, digital-only publishers are also struggling. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in December that Google and Facebook are “paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users,” and that “this puts high-quality creators at a financial disadvantage, and favors publishers of cheap media.”“

And the Wall Street Journal to pursue:“Google and Facebook have become the primary and de facto regulators of the news business, and governments around the world are starting to recognize the danger. British Prime Minister Theresa May announced earlier this month that her government would review the economics of internet news consumption. Regulators in Germany, Israel and South Korea are investigating how Google’s business practices have disrupted the media market and harmed publishers and consumers. U.S. regulators, on the other hand, have rarely looked into Google or Facebook—and never at their influence in the news marketplace.

Some voices on the left and right are calling for Google and Facebook to be regulated as utilities. But there is an easier solution: exempt news publishers from certain aspects of antitrust regulation.

U.S. antitrust laws, designed to promote fair competition and prevent consolidation, actually make it harder for traditional news outlets to compete with Silicon Valley giants. Under current law, for instance, news publishers cannot get together and agree to withhold their product unless they receive a return on their investment.”

YouTube (owned by Google) warned some accounts which had reported that the latest school mass shooting in Florida was a “hoax” and the victims were “actors”. Nice, but those sort of “fake news” are not really worse than decades of lies from the Main Stream Media. Lies, or non-saids (French magazines reports that US president Jimmy Carter started the war in Afghanistan, which killed many millions, from his own administration, were censored, so US Americans really don’t know that! By the way, my point of view that Carter, Clinton and Obama were fake, not to say evil, is spreading. In the case of Obama, that depressed me….) For Carter, July 3, 1979 attack against Afghanistan, please consider:

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

***

What to do is that there should legal recourse against any medium declared a public utility, and yet, practicing censorship:    

To become a medium of public utility, there should be, and could be, two ways:

1. Being declared to be so, by legislative decision, and Google and Facebook, and all the major media, certainly should be.
2. Applying to become so (for example this site would).

Any medium of public utility would have to satisfy some requirements, such as trying to tell the truth when claiming to do so (poetry and fiction would be allowed, but under those labels). Public utility media would also have to avoid censorship, and be ready to justify it (that mean be ready to justify when censorship is applied; for example, the NYT would be required to justify why it censored me systematically when I comment Krugman’s posts…)

More than a decade ago, a philosophy site banned me for life for “fantastic logic” and stealing (from myself) my own (!) intellectual property (which I had made the mistake to put on their site as comments; so they viewed my ideas as their own thereafter, and forbid me to publish said ideas of mine on my old, Tyranosopher, site…) Ridiculous, but at least they provided some reason (last year I learned that the main, very famous philosopher behind that site, an old enemy of mine, called Searle, has been accused of sexual harassment by many girls and women, and was suspended from his prestigious university position; that didn’t surprise me, as I considered him a thief already… Sexual harassment is a form of thievery, and assault.)

When a medium is unwilling to give any reason for the censorship it applies, it should not be given the privileges associated to journalism, the respect of implied scholarship, nor the prestigious aura of “public utility”.  

Your devoted servant, glad to be, hopefully, of some public use,

Patrice Aymé

WHAT IS IT, TO KNOW? Does the Unconscious Know? Yes! What’s the Unconscious Anyway? WE FEEL, THEREFORE WE THINK

Being conscious doesn’t mean one is conscious of being conscious. Thinking is, first of all, an emotion! A set of emotions! An avalanche of emotions! Nor does knowing require that one knows one is knowing!

Suppose I am outside, and a terrible black cloud appears, and grows, and grows, towering ever more, and obscurity in the distance extends, ever more. Do I know something bad is about to happen? That’s a good guess! So I do know something, even though it’s nothing precise, or certain. But what are we sure of, in this world, besides death and taxes? We know that there is a probability that, this is all we know for sure… Just like in Quantum Mechanics! Probabilistic knowledge! Determinism was an illusion! When we know, we know, sort of. We were doing Quantum Mechanics all along, like Mr. Jourdain was doing prose, all along, and we didn’t know it!

Indeed, what is it, to know?

As I contemplate doom and gloom in the distance, this ominous cloud blossoming, occulting everything, I certainly start to feel, in my heart of hearts, that something terrible may happen. My emotional system knows something dreadful seems to be coming my way, but does that mean I “know” it? Some will say that sort of knowledge is not really knowledge. It amounts to nothing. However, emotions, e-motions are what makes people move, they move not just bodies, but reason itself. Yet, I sure know enough to be overwhelmed by a feeling of doom and gloom. That, in turn, will motivate me to look for a house, a cave, or barring those, some thick trees, a burrow, a trench…

Or look at the same sort of situation on a shorter timescale: suppose an avalanche or a predator, or a snake suddenly becomes apparent. My emotions know, and my brain will react, before I can describe the situation in words. The delay can be considerable, as all brain resources can be mobilized in desperate avoidance maneuvers, depriving the rest of this noble organ from any capability.

 

No time to think one is thinking! Too busy thinking! When does the adventurer know that he is in deep trouble? When he starts skiing funny? Of course. His brain got flooded by one emotion: AVALANCHE! At that point his consciousness became a slave to survival, as directed by a brain in full survival mode. Notice that he tries to stay on his feet, as long as he can, and gain speed over the avalanche itself, by heading straight down with a leftward angle, probably as his brain perceived, or established that the maximum development of the avalanche was maximum centrally, and to the right. Navarro (that’s his name) knew there was a cameraman to the left, and, although he had an anti-avalanche airbag, it made sense to get out of most of thick of the thousands of tons of snow roaring down.

***

Don’t smirk. Nowadays there are devices called avalanche bags. They are carried in special backpacks. When a backcountry skier is caught in an avalanche, the skier is supposed to pull on a cord. That activates the filling of a huge bag which then makes the skier ride down the avalanche like a bobbing cork, as the ensemble of skier plus airbag is lighter than the raging snow rushing down. It works very well… except that many skiers don’t deploy the bag! Why? My theory: their brains are too busy doing other things, to think about deploying the airbag. They just forget about it, too busy their brains being at saving their lives! Another name for it, some will say, is: panic. This is why armies drill troops as much as they do: they hardwire the behavior.

I have direct experiences of this sort of situations, as I love the outdoors a little bit too much. That includes two avalanches, both in Chamonix, and actually only a few miles apart. There was total absence of panic. When what looked as much of the spectacular peak of the Drus, the second most famous mountain in Chamonix, was falling towards me, in an ice funnel a mile high, I was certain that I was going to die, what did my brain do? Howl to heavens about the unfairness of it all? It was too busy to be panicked.

So the situation is a bit like this, in the case of ultimate peril: OK, this is death, incoming. However, panicking is not the subject at hand. The only reasonable thing to do, the only possibility, is to run across that ice couloir, towards that smooth and vertical, granite wall, 15 meters away. No alternative.

The brain is conditioned to do what needs to be done, even if completely hopeless. Because what is hopeless and fruitless for the individual is an investment and fruitful for the species. Indeed:

***

What is the evolutionary root of this?

Insuring the survival of the species is why and how it evolved. Suppose you are prehistoric man, confronting ten famished saber tooth lions, one hundred meters from your cave, and you have no weapon. What to do? There is no hope, you are saber tooth lion dinner, so put the hope of survival aside. Your survival doesn’t matter, but that doesn’t mean your life’s mission is finished. You can still fight ferociously, for goodness. Prehistoric man’s brain will then try to gouge a lion’s eye. Thus exacting a heavy price on the saber tooth lion species. Your vengeful sacrifice will help those in the cave, your family, tribe and friends, to survive. Actually, the lions know this, all clever predators know this, and they are leery to attack you: clever predators know enough rudiments of human psychology, they know enough of the human spirit, to know that, even cornered and weapon-less, a prehistoric man will fight to death, and exact a heavy price. So they may even leave you alone, and go for simpler prey.

(By the way, during World War Two, many populations, especially the Norwegian, the Poles, the French, the Yugoslavs, and Soviet resistance, exhibited this behavior, of suicidal, vengeful killing of Nazis, no matter what. The Nazis had not expected this, maybe because they were, as fully trained fascists, too much into obedience. This had decisive strategic consequences, fully in evidence during terminally ferocious battles in the Fall of 1941, including the Battle of Moscow, Bir Hakeim (when 3,000 French prevented the Afrika Korps to encircle the British Army), Stalingrad, and the exploits of various resistance: more than 7,000 Nazi trains were attacked, crossing Poland,  and the French resistance made the difference between success and defeat after D Day… As crack Nazi divisions, such as SS Das Reich, took three weeks to crawl to Normandy, instead of the expected three days.)

This inter-specific psychological interactions between beast and human consciousness can still be observed today. When weaponless Maasai confront real lions in Africa nowadays, the lions will typically behave like beaten dogs, respecting the human so much, they will do something else, like take a hike: the Maasai use this knowledge of leonid minds on a regular basis. And reciprocally. A Maasai alone with a stick will keep a lion pride at bay, just from the respect he inspires… I have myself engaged in this behavior, even as a child, and without a stick… 

So what is it, to think? Not necessarily to get discursive about it. The logos is a form of thinking, most accomplished (a particular case of the logos is the traditional concept of reason). However the general case is rather: “I FEEL, THEREFORE I THINK!”

This is a vast generalization and a deepening of ancient trains of thought. For example, in “A Treatise of Human Nature” (1738), David Hume observed that: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”

What I add is that much, and sometimes most thinking, even occasionally nearly all of it, is itself removed from discursive consciousness. This is what happens in dreams. It is also what happens, at least partly in accidents. Victims often don’t remember the accident itself. The usual explanation is that the short term memory circuits had their power cut down, as it is directed somewhere else in the brain. But I would go further: the entire machinery of the usual form of consciousness is useless, and shut down!

All this as a preliminary to, and a consequence of a question in Quora:

Quora asked: At what point did German Commanders realize the war (WWII) was lost for Germany?

Predictably someone whined that the question was poorly posed: it lacked precision, and my iconoclast answer, was even worse (shortly after writing it, that someone realized that I used a generalization of the notion of knowledge, thus he deleted his full page of objection! Too bad, it was a good example of much that was wrong in conventional epistemology…)

I gave my own answer (and will reproduce it here soon): on September 3, 1939, the top Nazis got that ominous feeling, that dreadful sensation, that they abominable show was over: the French Republic had declared war, British poodle in tow (the UK’s war declaration preceded the French one by minutes, but 95% of the forces were French, and it was France which was bound to receive the brunt of the fighting).

So, in their hearts of hearts, the Nazis knew they were done: their probability to vanquished the combined might of the French and British empires was close to zero, especially in light of the fact that Nazi survival depended entirely upon the ongoing goodwill of the USA relative to Nazism… keeping in mind that the US was the Franco-British own personal offspring, the world’s mightiest brat.

However just like someone caught in an avalanche, the Nazis couldn’t stop, they couldn’t dare to put it in words. Instead, instead of renegading on what they were, instead of evolving out of their neurological dead-end, instead of making a logos out of it, the Nazis opted for neurological laziness, doing more of what they had built themselves to be, clinging to that old human instinct to deal with ultimate situations: great vengeance! Thus the Nazis subconsciously decided to extract a heavy price for having been so savagely interrupted in their robust, yet semi-peaceful (the way they saw it), takeover of the world, or, at least, Eastern Europe, by the Great German Reich… (Just as the 1935 UK-Hitler “Naval” Treaty had envisioned…)

Thus we have here a spectacular explanation for the thoroughly imbecile, self-defeating, mass criminal behavior of the Nazis in World War Two… It was deliberate. Not because the Nazis were trying to win, but because the Nazis knew that they had lost (to start with!)

Great vengeance is an evolutionary adaptation which has insured the survival of the species, by teaching the rest of the brainy biosphere, that human principles rule.

However, great vengeance can be diverted from its laudable evolutionary reason, and that’s a warning: it means irrationality can have the deepest cause. 

Be conscious, and worry, that consciousness is conscious of  what can’t even be put in words.

Patrice Aymé

February 24, 2018

Land of the Crazy Gunfighters, Irrational Slaves to their Masters

When Masters want slaves they teach them to think irrationally, about anything but the task that they were ordered to do: 

Trump wants to give “concealed guns” to teachers who have “military or special training experience.” Is then the solution to insanity ever more insanity? OK, in all fairness, Trump also pointed out that guns should be less available to the insane, and schools should be made as secure as banks. Yes, they should be more secure than banks. And, yes, Congress is suddenly worried that it would have to do something about guns, after eight years of lofty hypocrisy from Obama, moving his mouth parts, Trump seems to mean business…

The easiest solution to reduce the availability of guns in the USA would be a referendum… Indeed, politicians are hopelessly corrupted by the electoral process: to be elected politicians have to please power, hence money, thus the NRA.

(Presently elected, extremely influential politicians, all the way up to the president, and senators, got dozens of millions of dollars to be elected, from the NRA alone! Trump got 30 millions, Senator McCain, ex-presidential candidate of the Republicans, got 5 million dollars, etc.)

However a referendum is not authorized by the US Constitution! This is a general problem in the US democracy: it is not a democracy: We The People decides NOTHING! Only oligarchs, some of them “elected” do! (Elected by whom? The oligarchy owned media?) It is just what is called, misleadingly, a “representative” democracy, truly literally an oligarchy, where less than 2,000 individuals decide of everything (and most of them are unelected). 

US America: I can’t think, therefore I will shoot.

And this lack of democracy affects not just US “democracy”: the elected “representatives” being corrupted… by the electoral process, Switzerland and California use referenda. The results are excellent in Switzerland, and go a long way to explain the wealth of that country (laws passed directly by We The Swiss People have to then be voted by the Swiss Parliament, after an arbitration of sorts).

While waiting for a change of the US Constitution, the only hope is to persuade the plutocratically owned, or influenced media to drum up a campaign against guns, pointing out to the case of Australia. In Australia, a brutal gun ban proved safe and effective.

So yes, the gun situation is crazy in the US. Guns are used mostly to gun down friends and family: only 16% of lethal attacks against women are caused by strangers. And in most of the 84% of attacks left, guns caused death.

So why this crazy situation? As early as primary school, US children are taught team sports with their emotional aura of “us against them”. Instead of knowledge, wisdom, a restrictive behavior is imprinted: “us against them”, as the MOST important behavior to embrace. No wonder it ends up with a will to shoot, as the most significant behavior to be dominated by.

(The obsession with team sports is para-military, and used as a melting pot in US society. Thereof, the countless brutal, obscure sport analogies used by top male decision makers in the USA; fathers teach their sons, obsessively hundreds of scores of hundreds of team, preferentially in American football and basket ball: this is what is used as a parody of culture in the USA; it is macho and totally brain-dead: few of these people ever practiced American football.)

This crazy obsession with team sports, macho and brain-dead, with long lists of scores, shapes herd mentality, brainless herd mentality, as intended. Because a team is fundamentally a herd. It is also a related to the Texas mentality proudly brandished by the present Secretary of State, the mentality of the “brand”. In Texas, the morality is that one “fights for the brand”, as if it were a religion. Branding is what one does to cattle, or slaves, using a red-hot iron to leave… a brand on the skin, an awful scar of third degree burn, symbolizing, and marking the owner’s possession. Rex Tillerson is very proud of having one soul’s owned by the brand It doesn’t matter if the brand is right, or wrong. The important idea is to fight for whom employes you, employment is the supreme morality . (Notice that this is pretty identical to the mentality promoted by Kant and Hitler, the Fuehrerprinzip: just put that Swastika on, and proceed, obey orders, kill the Indians, no questions asked…)

The end result of that compulsion into team sports, characteristic of US education, is that, after coming out of school, US children are ready to enter the army, or the corporation, or obey “brands” and their plutocratic masters, blindly. As intended! Thinking creatively is not an option. Once a top, senior US born architect foamed at the mouth telling me I was insane to think of changing the US Constitution (by allowing referenda). Apparently, I was more than insane, I was infuriating: he was positively enraged, and I was baffled that such a minor suggestion would be the cause of such a fury. All the more as his Berkeley mansion was plastered by various works of Tibetan Buddhism he referred to in hushed tones, as if the various deities were going on to punish him, should we stray from those Buddhist notions. Now I understand better: the brand is the USA, take it, or leave it! The USA is the temple, as it is, and if you don’t respect that temple, off with your head.  

Skeptics will point out to the vibrancy of the US economy, South African born Elon Musk, etc. And then claim the USA is very innovative. However, that apparent innovation is related to another problem: why is change stifled more in Europe than China? Thus, that’s another debate: the size of the US economy, and its empire makes US companies dominant, and actually anything US dominant, even when not the best…

This teaching of individual irrationality, and submission to the herd, love of the herd, frenzy to belong to a herd, a team, an Internet hate group, a brand, is why the US is full of guns, and why nobody can rationally defend this, and most of these non-defenders don’t mind to be unable to justify their own behavior. The gun debate, or lack thereof, is a testimony of the inability of US citizens to think, while promoting that dearth of reason, proudly, righteously. That’s why great progressive president Obama preached god, every occasion he had, including all and any shooting, while doing strictly nothing about it: god, a friend of his, is the head of the herd which Obama wants to lead too. In spite of a supermajority, Obama and his herd of pseudo progressives could do nothing about guns (nor about the “Dreamers”, nor reconstituting Glass-Segal, the Banking Act of 1933, nor anything disrupting the established order…)

Right now, on the Internet, US influence is overwhelming, the entire world is thinking US American. And this tends to make the entire planet subject to the same low quality thinking. Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am”. Does that mean that if one thinks less one is less? It does! Somebody who thinks just as masters want her, or him, to think is less, maybe less than a free human: a slave… Slaves to guns, because slave to those who want to divide them…

Patrice Aymé

Dwarf Galaxies Contradict Standard Cosmology, BUT NOT SQPR!

Standard Cosmology Threatened, SQPR Proven?

Cosmology matters, it has always mattered, ever since there are reasons, and we humans try to refine them. Cosmology is the laboratory of pure reason.

The standard cosmological model is called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model. “Lambda” is for the Cosmological Constant, an invention of Albert Einstein (hey, you see, Albert invented a few things, on his own, contrarily to what he claimed in self-derision…). Lambda basically says that space, spacetime itself, could have an energy independent of the mass-energy tensor (the energy of all and any particles). Dark Matter, in that model, is assumed to be some, so far mysterious, thing, spread all about, right from the start. A type of particle, so far undiscovered (standard physicists would guess).

After the Big Bang, in the ΛCDM, the universe expands: light takes ever longer to go between the developing clumps of matter which will end up as galactic clusters. In these clumps, Dark Matter concentrates, like the rest. Dark Matter reacting only to gravity, it ends up forming the next generation, more concentrated clumps (it’s not held back by radiation pressure from lighting stars, ect.). These Dark Matter kernels in turn attract material which ends up more or less rotating (the bigger, the more rotation), and we call that galaxies. Dwarf galaxies stay irregular and often don’t rotate as flat disks. Giant galaxies such as the Milky Way, Andromeda and Centaurus A, rotate mightily, and find themselves with dozens of smaller galaxies as satellites.

Centaurus A (NGC 5128) is an unusual giant elliptical galaxy crossed by a dust lane. The yellow halo is made of billions of yellow stars. It is ten billion light years away (5 times further than Andromeda, and is the largest closest giant galaxy we can see, after Andromeda (others may be hidden by dust). It is accompanied by 16 Dwarf Galaxies rotating in the same plane as Centaurus A itself. Something absolutely not predicted by ΛCDM. Width of the picture is 16 arc minutes, half of the full moon (which 30 arc minutes, half a degree).

***

The ΛCDM model is, at first sight, impressive. Computer simulations of the model with observations are considered to be very successful on very large scales (larger than galactic clusters, up to the observable horizon). But  it has a “small scale crisis”:  too many dwarf galaxies, too much dark matter in the innermost regions of galaxies, too much Dark Matter halos (which are not observed). These small scales are harder to resolve in computer simulations, so it is not yet clear whether the problem is the simulations, non-standard properties of dark matter, or a more radical error in the model.

However, worse is now surfacing: the distribution of dwarf galaxies in a flat disk around their mother galaxy is absolutely not predicted by the ΛCDM paradigm.

ΛCDM predicts Dwarf Galaxies around a giant galaxy, but also predicts their orbits should be left to chance, there is not enough time since the Big bang to develop a huge rotation of the supergalactic cloud. ΛCDM says galaxies formed nearly instantaneously, after being torn on the outskirts by Dark Matter clumps which then make Dwarf Galaxies.

An international team of astronomers has determined that Centaurus A, a massive elliptical galaxy 13 million light-years from Earth, is accompanied by a number of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting the main body in a narrow disk. This is the first time such a galactic arrangement has been observed outside the Local Group, home to the Milky Way, and anchored by it, Andromeda and the much smaller Triangulum galaxy. (By the way, it turns out that Andromeda is roughly the same size as the giant Milky Way, and not larger, as previously thought. The error came from overestimation of the Dark Matter in Andromeda, from too gross an application of the Virial Theorem. All this may have consequences for life in the universe, as it is easy to find reasons for zones in giant galaxies more hospitable for life, which less organized galaxies won’t have… But I digress.)

***

Dwarf galaxies move in unexpected ways in Milky Way, Andromeda and Centaurus A. This contradicts Standard Cosmology:

Giant galaxies like our Milky Way are orbited by satellite dwarf galaxies. Standard cosmological simulations of galaxy formation predict that these satellites should move randomly around their host. Müller et al. examined the satellites of the nearby elliptical galaxy Centaurus A. They found that the satellites are distributed in a planar arrangement, and 14 members of the plane (out of 16) are demonstrably orbiting in the same direction. This is inconsistent with more than 99.5% of comparable galaxies in simulations. Centaurus A, the Milky Way, and Andromeda all have highly statistically unlikely satellite systems. This observational evidence suggests that something is wrong with standard cosmological simulations.

In other words, ΛCDM predicts that there should be a halo of Dark matter and Dwarf Galaxies. There is not. (Whereas SQPR predicts planar structures, see below!)

“The significance of this finding is that it calls into question the validity of certain cosmological models and simulations as explanations for the distribution of host and satellite galaxies in the universe,” said co-author Marcel Pawlowski, “Hubble Fellow” in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine.

He said that under the lambda cold dark matter model, smaller systems of stars should be more or less randomly scattered around their anchoring galaxies and should move in all directions. Yet Centaurus A is the third documented example, behind the Milky Way and Andromeda, of a “vast polar structure” in which satellite dwarves co-rotate around a central galactic mass in what Pawlowski calls “preferentially oriented alignment.“

The difficulty of studying the movements of dwarf satellites around their hosts varies according to the target galaxy group. It’s relatively easy for the Milky Way. “You get proper motions,” Pawlowski said. “You take a picture now, wait three years or more, and then take another picture to see how the stars have moved; that gives you the tangential velocity.”

Using this technique, scientists have measurements for 11 Milky Way satellite galaxies, eight of which are orbiting in a tight disk perpendicular (!) to the spiral galaxy’s plane. There are probably other satellites in the system that can’t be seen from Earth because they’re blocked by the Milky Way’s dusty disk.

***

SQPR Versus ΛCDM:

To avoid the concept of Dark Matter, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) have been suggested. It seems to me clear that they don’t work. Moreover, MOND is an ad hoc explanation: have problem, invent specific axiomatics to solve problem. Besides solving what looks like Dark Matter, without Dark Matter, and this, only around galaxies, not during collisions, MOND has no reason for being. The more evidence piles up, the less plausible it looks.

My own theory, SQPR is quite the opposite. It is a MODIFIED Quantum Dynamics (MOQD): it predicts a Sub Quantum Reality, to make Quantum Mechanics logically complete, and causal, with a nonlocality that will not be as “spooky” (to use Einstein’s bon mot). SQPR predicts Dark Matter, and it predicts that Dark Matter is CREATED inside giant galaxies, just the same as Black Holes are created inside giant galaxies (at ten times the rate of growth inside smaller galaxies). So, with me, Dark matter becomes a Quantum effect. The exact predictions are these:

Young giant galaxies will have little Dark Matter. Dark Matter is emergent.

Dark Matter will form in disks… And Dwarf Galaxies too.

SQPRs predictions are completely different. But fit observations…

My scenario is this: giant gas clouds, galactic size, of normal matter, coalesce first from the pull of gravity. As they do, conservation of angular momentum will augment the rotation speed (there always will be some rotation to start with, it’s nearly the same phenomenon as in cyclones formation). Implosion of the galactic size cloud, in conjunction with the rise of angular speed, creates a flat disk. This disk will contain lumps in the outer zone: dwarf galaxies, similar to planet formation in a solar system. Meanwhile, the Quantum Interaction, at cosmological distance, will churn out Dark Matter.

So we will typically end up with a flat disk of Dwarf Galaxies rotating in the same plane as the growing disk of Dark Matter of the giant galaxy. (Notice that I predict Dwarf Galaxies will have less Dark Matter, in the typical case).

Objectors may brandish the fact that the Dwarf Galaxy disk of the Milky Way is perpendicular, a glaring contradiction with my model. Well, my retort to that: something happened which yanked one relative to the other. The local group contains more than 54 galaxies, and it’s not even clear the large ones have all been found out, because of Milky Way dust: so a large galaxy passing by could have disrupted the dynamics of the Milky Way with its Dwarf Galaxy disk. There are plenty of observations such vast distortions between galaxies (and in the Solar System, Uranus can be contemplated, whose rotation axis is perpendicular to that of all the other planets, and where common sense would put it, perpendicular to ecliptic: clearly something big and weird happened which rotated the rotation axis spectacularly; by the way, Mars rotation axis also wobble spectacularly, although it’s coincidentally the exact same angle on the elliptic as Earth’s, right now, another spectacular coincidence (strange occurrences are not a proof of the existence of gods; however the case of Dwarf Galaxies, considered here, is 3/3… And actually more, and it becomes very statistically significant, if we look at the set of all Dwarf Galaxies around MW, A, Centaurus A).

***

Mavericks, such as yours truly argue that, like much modern physics, and related to that, the ΛCDM model is built upon an intricate foundation of conventionalist stratagems, rendering it unfalsifiable in the sense promoted by Karl Popper. Mavericks have to be taken seriously: several experts howled, for many decades, that there was Dark Matter. They were viewed as having fallen to the Dark Side (naturally enough). Then a serious mathematician called Segal pointed out that there was a Dark Energy problem: the cosmic acceleration itself accelerated, he insisted, and wrote an entire very serious book about it. In spite, or because of, these graves accusations, the entire field was ignored for more than 50 years (entire books about Dark Matter and the accelerating acceleration of the universe, were discarded as cranks): governments prefered to finance militarily useful physics (“high energy” physics) rather than potentially revolutionary physics.   

Anyway, things are quickly coming to a head. Astronomy is finally getting financed much more than it used to be. Astronomy, experimentation contemplated, on the largest scale, is shattering physics. Noble high energy physicists were studying only 5% of the universe, says astronomy…

ΛCDM says Dark Matter was always there. I suggest instead that it was created, by standard Mass-Energy and how (as Black Holes were created, albeit from a Quantum, not gravitational, mechanism). We will see. First we see, then we think.

Patrice Aymé

Anti-Intellectualism Will Make Our Body Good?

Another day, another revelation. After stumbling on this article in Medium explaining why science is wrong. I was struck how much more popular that article was than real, fascinating science articles in the same issue. Then the same prolific author, Zat Rana, comes out with an article slickly claiming that depth gets in the way of clarity, a revelation to “help you”. The title is revealing: “The Philosopher’s Problem: When and Why Thinking Can Be Harmful.“

Why science is wrong, why depth is bad, thinking harmful… The (self-described) “engaging” style of that journalist is slick (he is just a journalist, whereas the little read real science articles next to his were written by scientists). Mr. Zana has at least 50,000 “followers”. “Followers” is where it’s at; we are back to tribalism, as I discovered during the last presidential elections when many urged me to declare for Hillary, anything else was “bad form”. “Bad form” included Bernie Sanders… who, I was told “lacked experience” (after 50 years in elected politics including mayor, congressman, senator, and stays in Cuba and the USSR…) Up high in the media, many were on the Obama-Clinton gravy train…

Indictments have been made in the Russian influence machine in the USA. Well, it’s not just the Russians. What one could call the “Davos” machine is much more powerful.

Back to Zana’s “engaging” propaganda against science, and now thinking and “depth”. Clearly there was a machine behind that slippery slope, like there is one behind self-declared Jewish supremacist Steven Pinker or the Guardian newspaper, posing as left, but then financed by plutocrat Bill Gates, then publishing Pinker… and censoring my comment on Pinker, naturally. Sure enough, essayist Zat Rana, is part of the “World Economic Forum”…Davos, the much flaunted worldwide plutocratic conspiracy. He also writes at “Quartz”, another plutocratically financed device. But, well, it seems we have to learn to live with plutocrats in command. Even going to space now depends upon plutocrats (as governments dropped the space ball, in another deep conspiracy organized by their sponsors, namely said worldwide plutocratic conspiracy).

We are increasingly heading towards the same situation of the late Roman Republic when only men connected to extreme wealth could act. This ended when the leader of the “Populares” the extremely wealthy top general Caesar was assassinated by his own class; thereafter it has been dictatorship for 2061 years and counting. Caesar may have been a scumbag in Gaul, but he understood Roma was not militarily secure, and had to be made so (China had the same problem a millennium later, with a near-terminal outcome, when the Mongols considered annihilating it).  

Zat Rana’s essay extolled the “Cogito Ergo Sum” of Descartes, a famous point of view, so dumb, even plutocratic philosopher Wittgenstein used to make fun of it in Cambridge. Wittgenstein would go around the halls, saying:”I think, therefore it rains”. The Cogito is not just dumb, it’s obviously false. When one is in full action, one doesn’t think about thinking to reveal to oneself that one is. Any speed sport will easily remove that notion. Barreling down a mountain on skis, facing a towering wave in the surf, solo climbing 3,000 feet about the maw of a giant bergshrund (they wont even find your body!) are the sort of activities which are all about existence perceived, and not thinking about thinking.

(Descartes probably rolled out the “Cogito” to demolish Christianism, a crucial objective at the time.)

Sure enough, following singing the praises of the dumb Cogito, the Davos essayist pushed the lie that man is the only animal capable of thinking about thinking, something that, we now have known for quite a while experimentally, is not true.

Other animals think about thinking, and even about others thinking. Many birds, if they ascertain that another bird is a known thief, will hide food again, somewhere else, when the observing bird has been removed. That means birds can have a “theory of mind”. As Ludwig Van Beethoven put it in the 9th:”…Even the worm was given desire…”

Ants work hard and cleverly. Army ants build bridges for their army, adapting and modifying circumstances given to them by nature (as pictured above). We also have to work, of course, but thought can replace work, and we ever more think rather than work.! That’s not jut the way, it’s the only way!

Thinkers don’t run around in circle like processional caterpillars (which have been observed circling around, following each other for a week). Far from it. Descartes invented analytic geometry, enabling, among other things, the invention and writing down of calculus by Fermat (and then Leibniz; Newton used an idiosyncratic approach). So asserting Descartes brought nothing imminently practical to our lives is to say the last four centuries of scientific and technological expansion, which rest on analytic geometry, Descartes’ invention, were nothing. That’s not just grossly anti-intellectual, it’s counterfactual.

It’s so much more important to be wise than being a worker, that this is the name of our species: Homo Sapiens (Homo Faber, the fabricating Homo, was proposed by French philosopher Bergson, and rightly rejected; as seen above, even insects make tools). Homo in general and Sapiens in particular, is all about smarts, depth… not work. Smarts, precisely to avoid work. We got to smarts through ever deeper thinking. For dedicated workers genetically, or epigenetically incapable of deeper thinking, consider ants, or… slaves.

To believe we have to be careful about thinking deeply is reasoning like a slave, who does deep only when asked by Master. It is actually the master definition of a slave. But, of course, among slaves, it’s more than useful, it’s the key to self-fulfillment.

In truth, the world is not about “work”, nor do we need to “make it work”. The world works very well without us. First we need to find out what we want to achieve, with this world. Right now we are supposed to heed the advice of our masters, and those who work for them feverishly, like Zat Rana. And this is exactly what happened. Not all are Elon Musk, hell bend to explore the universe. Most plutocrats’ true calling his laziness, endowed by cruelty. Not an indication of nice global outcome.

Patrice Aymé

Note: Here is the conclusion, in extenso of the Davos essayist. Zat Rana:

“The Takeaway

The power of depth has its time and place. And philosophers, like Descartes, who have engaged this depth have given us some striking insights.

That said, if this ability to think deeply isn’t controlled and managed, it spills out beyond the domain in which it finds its strength. We have to be very careful about the degree to which we engage it.

The thing that actually makes the world work is clarity, and this clarity can only be found if we adequately train it to come through.

In the words of the legendary inventor Nikola Tesla, “One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”

Not every tangent we think about is worth exploring. Not every idea that pops up is worth considering. Not every nuance needs to be given its time.

Sometimes, all life demands of us is the ability to see the parts of reality we need to engage with, clearly and simply. It means that rather than adding more to our vision and observation via thought, we have to be disciplined about removing what isn’t useful and relevant.

This takes practice and intention. It requires you to think about thinking and slowly develop the awareness to watch your mental processing occur.

It’s not easy, but if honed, this kind of clarity changes everything.”

And Patrice will abstract this thus: The power of the depth of thinking has its time and place. One instant, one spot. Davos and its plutocracy, will control the rest, people. No probing question, no examined life. Even Socrates would have found this disgusting, and “not worth living“.

 

Science Is Always Right

Science is Right, By Definition, and ever more knowledgeable, from evolution.

What is science? What we know, for sure. Yes, because there is such an emotion as certainty, or quasi-certainty. It’s because we were pretty sure that we came down the trees into the savanna. To discover plenty of new, life saving truth, plenty of science. Like how to drink from, and cook tubers. So yes, there is a notion of truth, and it made us, our species, our genus, Homo, whose genius is to have mastered truth.

Prehistoric men were found with fire starting kits comprising dozens of parts. Humans have used science, what is sure, for millions of years. Fire for 1.3 million years, clothing for two million years (up north), stone tools and weapons for millions of years before that (monkeys and apes, even some birds do). All this was made possible by, and demonstrates sure knowledge: science.

Volcanic lightning is caused by friction (creating electric charges), and then dynamics. Separating small particles from big ones, an application of Newton’s F = ma; F is a given, from supersonic gas, but a, the acceleration, varies, as m, the mass of particles, vary. Hence charges get separated, something lightning solves.

We understand why a violent volcanic explosion generates lightning (one of thousands of triumphs of recent science). That does not mean that the prehistoric science of making fire with sparks from flints or friction from wood are wrong. Just the opposite: both mechanisms come into play to generate lightning from volcanoes. Science goes deeper, darker, ever more. 

Similarly, the twentieth century theories of gravitation did not make Newton wrong (as the naive is won to believe). Actually, the recent theories made Newton twice more right. Indeed. First, Newton pointed out exactly a problem with his theory, which he excoriated as “absurd” (and he used even more vigorous words): Newtonian style gravitation was supposed to be instantaneous, through empty space, Newton hated that. Laplace, a century later, invented the simple mathematical picture of a field propagating at finite speed; that caused waves (1807). A century later, Henri Poincaré, main author of what he called the “theory of relativity”, rolled out relativistic gravitational waves (1905).

After Poincaré’s death (1912), Einstein, working with Hilbert, produced a specialization of Poincaré’s general gravitational theories. That theory was just a MODIFICATION of Newtonian theory (which is its first order, that’s how the Einstein equation is found). Basically, as Poincaré found in 1899, light in Maxwell theory has inertial, thus gravitational, mass. As light was used as the metric in Poincaré’s Relativity, the metric of spacetime was mass dependent. (Those who have the Einstein cult can’t possibly understand the logic underlying the science just alluded to, and that includes many physicists!)

Claiming that science is always wrong is equivalent to saying that we know nothing. It was tried before, and not just by Karl Popper. The confused Socrates perniciously tried to impose that notion, that men were ignorant, and knew nothing (however Socrates knew more than the rest…). Of course, the elites knew everything (or acted as if they did): thus Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander, Antipater and Craterus were all friends, united in their belief that the people knew nothing. And thus 23 centuries of dictatorship was necessary.

Instead, the truth is the opposite: there is such a thing as truth and knowledge. Science is always right, and this is why planes fall off the sky so rarely, and we are going back to the Moon. That doesn’t mean that science can’t be made to become always more refined, powerful, all-knowing. Newtonian mechanics is good enough for rocket science, but, for GPS, one has to be a bit more subtle, and use Relativity (as clocks run slower in a gravitational field, and the greater, the slower…)

Science being right, doesn’t mean that scientists are always right each time they open their mouths. Science is right, scientists are wrong. Example? When physicists come around, and speak as if they were god, this being demonstrated because they apparently witnessed the birth of the universe, they are clearly crazy, and calling them “scientists” is a bit too quick: generously one could say that they are specialists driven to madness by all too many years of hard studies. 

We have gone a long way since Anaximander proposed we all evolved from fishes, and research professor Lamarck, after decades studying mollusk fossils in microscopes, confirmed that, indeed, life had evolved over millions of years (1800; parroted by others later). The Ancient Greeks were perplexed by static electricity. Now we understand it very well, and soon we will understand it better (as Quantum Computer fabrication will force us to understand better atomic and single electron dynamics).

Science is an exploration always renewed, but real knowledge has been accumulated, and when 2,000 Athenians lifted the general amnesty, to target Socrates specifically, and him alone, they showed us that epistemology should be taken seriously. Socrates claimed ignorance, the 2,000 jurors claimed he should have known. No, indeed, science is not fake news! Besmirching science with error painted all over is error unbecoming a deep thinker.

Patrice Aymé

P/S: The approach above is antipodal to that of Karl Popper. Popper basically believed that to be science, science ought to be demonstrably false (OK, I can never resist ridiculizing him, although I like Popper!) This silliness causes real damage: consider the essay linked above:”Why Science Is Wrong” it clamors in its click-bait title (the article is not as bad as its title, but the damage is done). 10,000 people applauded, thus identifying science and fake news, damaging knowledge, thus everything, and validating fake news. So you see, Popper may sound like an ethereal subject, considering the notion of science in the 1930s. But now, nearly a century later, we have popular authors regurgitating the same notion, that, if it’s science, it’s wrong. Popper would say, and did say, that it is not at all what he wanted to say. Yet, he said it, no mistake about that.

Climate Catastrophe, February 2018

A climate catastrophe is enfolding out there. Potentially the biggest in 65 million years, or more. This being civilization, chances are that, as the catastrophe unfolds, our rotten leaders, or one of them at least, and it could be just the plump Kim or his Swiss educated, stern, haughty, smirking, black dressed, even younger sister, decides to distract us all, with a nice thermonuclear showdown.

…For rotten leaders contemplate, Israeli PM Netanyahu, which Israeli police wants arrested, or South Africa’s Jacob Zuma: both are the rule, among the world’s great leaders. The difference is that they are prosecuted there: what makes them exceptional is that institutions, in Israel or South Africa, are after them. In most places, institutions are already too rotten themselves, to do this… Every two weeks, Obama went to visit his multibillionaire masters in the Silicon Valley tech monopolies; I know Californians who were in love with the sounds of his helicopter armada, flapping around, every two weeks, as he came to receive the latest payments. And they still are in love. Never mind that this killed democracy and innovation…

To document these titanic climate happenings while they occur, I will regularly post a “Climate Catastrophe” series, from brand new “moulins” in the supposedly indestructible East Antarctic ice shield (now melting, to the specialists’ unfathomable surprise) to Black Beetles devouring high altitude and high latitude trees…

“Climate change” is simply the fact that the lower atmosphere is stuffed with ever more heat, hence energy. It implies greater everything: greater droughts, floods, fires, heats, colds, bounties, insects, etc. A more chaotic climate, physically, and humanely.

Capetown is supposed to run out of water in April: an exceptional drought festers. It will the first large (4 million) urban area to run out of water. And NOT the last: one expects the dry belts to move up towards the poles. North of southern South Africa, there is Namibia, and it’s very dry…

The climate is getting disorganized, worldwide, as expected. In California, the drought is not just back, it never left (last year it flooded in California, right. However, flooding in some desert areas is chronic). Snow levels are now the lowest. Ever. The Sierra forest, 10,000 years old, is dying. The situation in California is hyper catastrophic, but nobody is talking. Officially the drought is over… but has never been worse!

Mount Cook, New Zealand. It is hard to believe, but we are on track to have all this ice disappear. That aesthetic blow will accompany an unconceived biological disaster, planet wide, which will disrupt all of civilization, in all ways. Mt Cook lost 50 meters in altitude, in a recent quake…

And our politicians, our self-declared leaders, are doing… nothing. Nothing much, besides moving their mouth parts. It’s not just Trump. Trump is a red herring, a scarecrow people brandish to excuse themselves from thinking, and absolve themselves, by calling him the cause of everything. In reality, the US Federal tax on gasoline is unchanged since 1993, and that has nothing to do with Trump. Obama could have brought the tax up, when he had a supermajority. But he was too busy getting guidance from big money. (Most plutocrats are gas-guzzlers, watch their private jets, or then think, like Trump, that, the more energy, the better…)

The indifference to massive taxes on fossil fuels in the USA has everything to do with the US population feeling little need to do something serious about the climate catastrophe, because it sees no catastrophe looming. Among young people (the ones with the rage to protest) the mental cancer of the so-called “social networks”, with their “likes”, “bots”, millions of “friends”, “trendings”, and veracity from (engineered) popularity or “links” have become the reference for thinking. That thought is organized by plutocrats, for plutocrats.

In England a so-called “judge” (an excellent phrase and concept of Trump, by the way) decided to keep Wikileaks’ Julian Assange under embassy arrest. He has been there for more than 5 years. The corrupt so-called “judge”, in a grandiloquent opinion, declared that Assange seemed to view himself above the law (Assange had good reason to fear deportation to the USA). Originally, Assange had been charged for raping a CIA agent (!) Sounds unbelievable, but I didn’t make it up. To celebrate that, she organized a party for him, two days later, complete with glowing tweets. But then the masters in Washington called, and everybody knew that Obama and his goons would do anything to arrest Assange (Clinton just called him a traitor and a Russian agent; Assange is not US, and Main Stream Media have authenticated many of his stories; Washington was furious, because Wikileaks revealed war crimes by the USA which were left unprosecuted… although those denounced the cover-up, were prosecuted with great ferocity).

Even worse, not content with uncovering US war crimes, Assange endangered cash cows of the so-called “democratic” party, and its pretend-opponents, such as Google.

The “rape” charges against Ms CIA agent were dropped by Sweden in May 2017. But the charge that Assange brutalized Washington and its agents (Google, etc.) is alive and well. Average US citizen don’t give a hoot: all too many are aware that one is best unaware that the USA has been doing so well from plundering, not just the nature of the biosphere, and nature itself, but also human nature.

All signals are red: global sea ice (both poles combined) is at the lowest ever, by a significant margin, sea level rise is accelerating, forests are dying, so are parts of the ocean. Plutocrats have been buying property in New Zealand, just in case. However, to give a slightly different perspective, from Ian Miller blog (Ian is a senior physical chemist):

Summer Storms, February 7, 2018:

New Zealand has just had some more bad weather. Not an outstanding statement, but it does add a little more to the sort of effects that climate change is bringing to us. We have had quite a warm summer. Certainly not as hot as Australia, but where I live we have had many days hotter than what before were outstandingly hot days. On many days, we had temperatures about ten degrees Centigrade above the January average. Apart from one day of rain shortly after Christmas, we had almost no rain from October and the country was in a severe drought. You may say, well, a lot of countries have months without rain – so what? The so what is that October and November are usually the rather wet months here.

Then a week ago we got a storm. It was supposed to be “a depression that was the remains of a tropical cyclone” but with wind speeds of 86 knots reported, by my count that is still a tropical cyclone, except it is no longer in the tropics. (It just limps in to a category 2 hurricane.) Why did it not die down? Probably because the surface waters of the Tasman are at record high temperatures, and seven degrees Centigrade above average in places, and warm sea waters feed these systems with extra energy and water.

Where I am, we were lucky because the system more or less passed us by. The highest wind speed here was 76 knots, but that is still more than a breeze. We also missed most of the rain. Yes, we did get rain, but nowhere near as much as South Westland, where 0.4 meters of rain falling in a day was not uncommon.

The rain did some good. A couple of scrub fires broke out in Otago, and it looked like they would be extremely difficult to contain, thanks to the drought. The best the fire service could do would be like spitting at it compared with what the cyclone brought to bear.

However, the main effect was to be a great inconvenience, especially to Westland. Westland is largely a very thin strip of flat land, or no flat land, running through very tortuous mountain country. If you have nothing better to do, go to Google Earth and zoom in on the town of Granity (41o37’47″S; 171o51’13″E). What you will see is the hill, which goes up very steeply to over 300 meters before rising more “gently to the town of Millerton at about 700 meters. Between the road and the sea is one layer of houses, and the storm was washing up into their back doors.

The hills and mountains are very young, which means they have very little erosion, whole a lot of the rock is relatively soft sedimentary rock. There are some granitic extrusions, and these merely provide another reason for the rest to be even more tortuous. The whole area is also torn apart, and constructed, from continuing earthquakes. Finally, there is fairly heavy subtropical rain forest, parts getting over ten meters of rain a year. The area is quite spectacular, and popular with tourists, and it is very well worthwhile driving through it. Once you could see glaciers flowing through rain forest; now, unfortunately, the glaciers have retreated thanks to global warming and they only flow down mountainsides but they are still worth seeing.

The net result of all this is that when this cyclone struck, the only road going north-south and was west of the mountains got closed thanks to slips (one was a hundred meters wide of fallen rock from a hill) and trees knocked over by the wind. Being stuck there would be an experience, especially since the place is basically unpopulated. If you want to see the wild, you tend to be short of facilities. Some were quite upset about this, but my question to them was, this cyclone was predicted for about three days in advance. If you really could not put up with it, why go there? One grump was recorded as saying, “This sort of thing would not happen in . . . ” (I left out the country – this person did not define them.) Well, no, it would not. They don’t get tropical cyclones, hurricanes typhoons, or whatever you want to call them, and they don’t have this difficult terrain. One way or another, we have to put up with weather.

However, the real point of this is to note there is still glacial progress being made to do anything sensible to hold global warming. There is a lot of talk, but most of it is of the sort, “We have to do . . . by the next fifty years.” No, we have to start a more determined effort now.

***

Another force 4 hurricane just struck Tonga and is now heading towards New Zealand. Yes, extra-tropical tropical cyclones were predicted, as a consequence of global warming, and have become facts (one hit Portugal last Fall; its enormous winds fed hundreds of fire storms before the rains hit). See the following essay, from 2008, to understand why the rise of temperature is just part of the problem:

Applying Equipartition Of Energy To Climate Change PREDICTS WILD WEATHER

“We” have to start a more determined effort? I agree. We are running out of time. As I said, raising fossil fuel taxes should be done immediately. And it’s not enough. And who is “we”? There is no “we” here! Our masters like it as it is, complete with a feeling of doom and gloom, alleviated by industrial escapism… The French president just declared that “counter-power” should not rise to the power of putting our great leadership, that great power, in difficulty, worldwide (or words to that effect). All our present leadership, worldwide, have not realized they are a new feudalism.

To get out of the hellish spiral we are in, a massive, total war effort in research and development should be engaged. Especially with thermonuclear fusion. However, the exact opposite has happened: the effort on ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, has been slowed down by ten (10) years… to save money (or, more exactly, how much it cost per year). Yet, at this point, it’s highly likely to work (especially in reactors larger than ITER)… modulo specific progress on an arsenal of attainable technologies. Thermonuclear fusion would replace ALL fossil fuels…

And the alternative is world war and one more return to the traditional fare of cannibalism (forget vegetarianism, when land is at a premium!)

You have been warned. It may be time to reconsider how people in general, and in particular the intellectuals, or experts, advising the great leaders, think! Hint: they are more biased than they think, and the more official the thinker, the more biased!

Patrice Aymé

Colonize Deimos! First Step To Space Invasion.

Space colonization has to start somewhere, and it won’t be easy.

A well known problem is radiation. It is considerable in space. On the ground we are protected not just by the magnetosphere, but by the equivalent of ten meters of water (the atmosphere, exerting a pressure of one kilogram per square centimeter). Vicious, hyper reactive dust is one problem. Astronauts’ testimony on the Moon showed their suits couldn’t have worked for another outing (from the dust, getting in all the articulations of the suits). Mars’ dust is not any better.

Gravity, or lack thereof, is also a drastic problem. In space it can be fixed: just use rotation. Although it was not tried experimentally yet, it is technologically feasible (and a familiar feature of sci-fi movies). On planets, it’s another matter: it is not clear that Mars has enough gravity for human health: we, Earth critters, evolved in the last four billion years, with Earth gravity. Trying to compensate with exercise is NOT working in the International Space Station: exercise mitigates the problem, but some of the damage to deepest parts of the femur bone seems irreversible. The flight surgeon of NASA, James Logan, MD, has thought a lot about these problems.

GlouconX, a contributor to this site, gave this link, which I found very interesting:

Mr. Logan’s solution? Colonize Deimos! Deimos is one of the two captured asteroids which Mars uses as satellites, The idea would be to send boring robots, and establish a base there, ready for occupation. Ultimately, enough space for one million people and full ecology could be dug there. One would need water: it’s not clear whether there is enough there, or not, as Deimos’ composition is unknown.other asteroid, like the dwarf planet Ceres, have water, and even massive quantities of it, 27% of the total mass, and close to the surface, as ice!

Going there, to Deimos or Ceres, in force, depends upon nuclear energy, both to go, to dig, and to stay. And since actually the nuclear fission engine is straightforward, and was tested 50 years ago very successfully, the decision is more political than technological:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/stuck-on-earth-earth-stuck-with-us/

From Deimos, the telerobotic exploration, exploitation and colonization of Mars could conducted… This is Dr. Logan’s message, and I agree 100%. It was long clear to me that only nuclear energy provided the energy density (by a factor of thousands!)

Deimos’ location is superior to Phobos for telerobotics operations, and it’s plenty big enough. Perhaps we could put in orbit around it a gravity generating station?

Once again, for the doubters, as president Kennedy said, we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Actually we do them because they are harder than anything we would do otherwise. And why is hard lovely? Because we, as a species, have always tried to do harder things. We have evolved into challenge defying creatures whose minds can only properly work that way. And why thus? because that’s how we survive, as a species!

And for those who, disparaging us, claim to prefer ants, to our wonderful minds, I have an ant-eater coming their way…

Patrice Aymé

 

Colonization Makes Us True: SpaceX Triumphs!

[OK, the word “colonization’ is… deliberately provocative (see below). Yet, there is none better, and it’s a major philosophical point! Deliberately provocative means, etymologically: entirely liberating inducement to vocalize…]

SPACEX TRIUMPH OPENS SPACE COLONIZATION: A FACTOR OF TEN LEAP

[NASA, United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, Soyuz, are finished as viable launch businesses… NASA’s SLS should be scraped right away..]

I Colonize, Therefore, I Have To Think:

Philosophy is a mood conducive to wisdom, that is truth. And truth consists in colonizing… space. Geographical, historical, psychological, physical, mathematical, spiritual, moral, cognitive space. “While the core mission of SpaceX is to establish a multi-planetary society”, says SpaceX. So in more sense than one, SpaceX mission longs for truth. (Be it only the truth of what led to an explosion!)

I know that the word and, even worse, the concept of “colonization” is hated by the PC crowd, which replaces thinking with bellowing together in great hatred and agreement. Hatred for “colonization” makes the colonization of space sounds immoral, and bound to failure. However, colonization works: at least 99%, of the PC crowd consists in descendants of (the hated) colonizers. Including the descendants of Australian natives, who colonized Australia, 65,000 years ago. Yes, “colonization” means the entire Earth.

We are a colonizing species. That’s how and why, we had to grow ever more wisdom, to outsmart the obstructions to successful colonization. Colonization is not just what we do, but how we evolved, thus what created us: our ancestors left the safety of the trees, and conquered the savanna. That will to space colonization in turn changed their minds into what we call human. Colonizing new space  changed our ancestors into ever bolder, smarter, meaner forms, all made possible by an ever more encompassing love (to educate, compensate, and enable socialization).

Key to SpaceX strategy is re-usability of the hardware, which, itself, rests on reliability, making rocket operations similar to normal planes. Here one sees the two side boosters of Falcon Heavy landing simultaneously at the place they were launched from. Both had ALREADY been used in previous launches. Wow. The center core had to brake from much higher hypersonic speed, and ran out of starter fluid (!), so had only one engine lighted in the final braking and exploded next to its drone ship barge…

Discoveries as recent as 2018 showed that Homo Sapiens was all over the Africo-Eurasiatic supercontinent much earlier than had been pontificated, interbreeding with its northern variant, Neanderthals, for hundreds of thousands of years (in a triumph for my mathematical theory of Neanderthal evanescence, and pseudo-disappearance).

Creative thinking itself is a form of colonization: go somewhere with new insight(s), interbreed with the native ideas, or situation, generate new emotion, new mentalities. Philosophy itself, by definition, is an emotion. But not just that: the etymologically root of wise is knowing from seeing. Now once one has seen with one’s eyes, one sees with one’s mind. To keep on knowing, one will have to see again. Thus philosophy itself, by definition, the love of knowing from seeing, thus anew always, goes always beyond, more. Or as emperor Charles Quint put it (in French, his native language): “Plus Oultre!”. (Thus, yes, Elon Musk is doing what Charles Quint would have financed. Charles V ordered a stop to American colonization, only when it became clear it had brought a holocaust to amazing civilizations; there is no amazing civilization on Mars, yet, astoundingly cool ice cliffs…)

Falcon Heavy is made of three Falcon first stage strapped together. That’s a total of twenty-seven kerosene-oxygen engines, with a total power of 18 jumbo jets at take-off, together.. Sounds simple, but it’s not: the forces involved are enormous, and resonances can occur, especially when the vehicle becomes supersonic, so the strapping together is tricky.

***

SpaceX has succeeded to land first stage cores safely, and re-used six of them already;Re-usability is the way:

Conventional rocketry uses the rocket just once: launch and destroy. That’s expensive. Going to orbit, though, shouldn’t be that expensive. Launching 64 metric tons at eight kilometers per second, as Falcon Heavy does, requires a lot of energy, but not anymore than a jumbo jet going from Los Angeles to Sidney. So it shouldn’t cost more. As an Airbus A380 cost around 400 million dollars. If one destroyed the A380 at each landing, that would make the trip cost 400 millions. This is exactly what is happening now to space travel. (To see this intuitively, assume it takes 30 minutes for an A380 to reach 10 kilometer high, and Mach 1; then, after ten hours, it will have reached 200 kilometers high and Mach 20; orbital speed is actually Mach 25… Using sea level Machs, another approximation; but the rough picture is clear… and correct!)

NASA ill-fated “Space Launch System” is scheduled to cost around a billion dollar per flight. The sort of price the late and ridiculous Space Shuttle cost. The Space Shuttle had to be expensively refurbished, it was way too delicate. Plus it had gigantic, useless wings.  

I have been highly critical of the massive financing of SpaceX by NASA, under Obama. It seemed obvious to me that the US government shouldn’t finance a private space operator. However, it turns out that many great new technologies were financed by government. The French government financed the first (steam powered) cars in the Eighteenth Century. It was actually a military project, and those cars were to be employed like tanks. The first balloons with humans on board were also more or less a government project (LouisVXI had decreed that condemned criminals should be the first fliers, but the inventors forced him to change his mind; the first military usage was in 1794, by the French army, for observation). The first planes were also a French military project (Ader flew 50 meters in 1890, and at least 300 meters in 1897, in front of an entire military committee  at Satory; the flights are not homologated, the Americans say, because of French military secrecy… but the fact they were French is enough to explain why the flights of the Wright Brothers more than six years later, in 1903, are still viewed as the first… which they were not).

The nuclear bomb was also government project: started in France, January 1938, it got exiled to Britain in June 1940, and then moved to the USA and Canada in case the UK would fall to the Nazis (there was also more uranium in the US)

The jet engine, radar, rocketry, electronic computer, were all government projects. So was going to the moon. In a way, all university and education has always been governmental (except for the very rich). That was blatant in China, with the examination system. Emperor Trajan had set-up scholarships (paid by a wealth tax), and the Franks made free universal education mandatory in the Eighth Century (founding the European university system by the same token, although the name itself appeared only in the Twelfth Century). All the big imperial technological projects, in Rome,as under the Achaemenids, or various Chinese dynasties were governmental, but then private industry got free usage (the Grand Canal in China, a government project had more than at least 10,000 large private boats using it every day… for centuries).

So what did I miss? Government support is justified when there is no profit in the endeavor. However, cost of edge tech in space collapsed faster than I realize, greatly thanks to advancing electronics. NASA, United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, Soyuz, made the same mistake, as they all believed rockets couldn’t be re-used. Musk and Bezos, both engineers, saw the truth.

So what is the difference between SpaceX and NASA? SpaceX introduces elements of greed, glory, personal input that a government agency can’t: it’s Nixon, a lawyer by training, who picked the Space Shuttle as the US next space transportation system. Mr. Musk and Blue Origins’ Bezos are college trained engineers.  

In any case, SpaceX reusability bet worked. The French dominated Arianespace, which had a splendid run with Ariane V, a disposable rocket, and many others, including Russians and Chinese, let alone NASA, didn’t believe reusable rockets were feasible. I don’t see them recovering from that erroneous belief. Reusability will make SpaceX dirt cheap, and reliable.

Thus the Trump administration should force NASA should to give up on its ultra expensive and now completely obsolete Space Transportation System (STS): it can’t work, even if it works. And it has no contracts, just three NASA projects to nowhere. By contrast, Falcon Heavy has already contracts.

Moreover Space X is developing at breakneck speed its BFR (Big Fu*king Rocket), which will supersede its prior rockets (it says, although that’s dubious as smaller rockets are useful). The BFR uses methane: methane can be made on Mars, but not only, it is full of hydrogen atoms, without the inconveniences of hydrogen.

***

Rome We Remember, & Won’t Duplicate. Space Colonization, Here We Come, Brains Will Follow:

So what next? Mars is still very far, radiation-wise. The Moon is closer, and has giant lava tubes. Those tubes make natural bases, especially if they can be pressurized.

There are huge ice cliffs on Mars, by 55 degree north. If we scaled up considerably some technologies we already have in baby form, such as electric propulsion, nuclear reactors, robotics and cryogenics, we could probably seed humanity in the Trappist system within 500 years…

Some will whine:’what happened to humanism, what happened to philosophy, wisdom? The argument has been made that we have to spread the risk to humanity by spreading among the planets, or mining resources, or exporting pollution. The argument has also been made that the challenge of space forces us to develop new technology. The later is actually the strongest argument.

Civilization as we know it on Earth, going quickly towards ten billions, but with the capability of sustaining only a fraction of that, is doomed, one way or another. We can exit that situation in two ways: either do like the Maya, who had a dense highly successful civilization, which collided with a long drought combined with an ecological crisis, and soon generalized war, imploding the civilization, bringing back human flesh on the menu. Or we can exit the other way: smarter, higher, more refined, with much more needed technology.

The Romans failed to take that technological turn, although they had the cognitive means to do so. After Greco-Roman civilization collapsed, the Franks rebuilt their way, rejecting slavery, and thus embracing the more advanced technology Rome had refused to develop, precisely because Roman plutocracy wanted to keep the slaves, and the citizens it treated as slaves, occupied. (To some extent, the same happened with China, in a milder form; however, although invaded by the Mongols, and later the rather similar Manchu, Chinese population didn’t collapse, in no small reason because those enemies were half sinicized, and relatively much less numerous.)  

The main reason to develop space technology is that we are all living on a spaceship, Earth. Moreover, industrial technology, and exploding demographics, as they are, have been destroying that spaceship sustainability. So we need to develop new technology, new space technology, being already on a compromised spaceship. Going to other planets may look like a hyper expensive, gratuitous exercise. But it’s not. It’s an exercise in trying to save ourselves.   

Patrice Aymé

Of God, Mice, And Men Who Believe They Created The Universe

When theists say that the universe exists because of God, they are saying that the universe exists, because of some agent they know: that make those theists vastly superior to us, simple miscreants, who do not happen to be acquainted with what, or who, created all and everything. Surely, those superior beings should lead us? So what sounds metaphysical, by asserting a “God” boils down to claiming a higher place in an all too human hierarchy.

“Universe” means literally, “turned into one”, whereas “multiverse” would be: “turned into many”. So the set of all multiverses is the universe. (So the alleged existence of “multiverse” is akin to Bertrand Russell’s famous paradox of the set whose elements are not elements of itself; Russell’s paradox brought down mathematical logic as it had been known prior; present day physicists have been repeating that mistake, from lack of basic culture in the matter of mathematical logic!)

If we were to claim, and, or, even worse, have the feeling, that we know why the universe exists, we would be claiming, or have the impression, that we were God. This is not the business of physics, only the business of those who want us to be guided by absolutism.

Alexander the Great, seeing his blood flow, asked himself that question: am I a God? His Greek and Macedonian companions laughed him off. Later, on the advice of his mom, Olympia, Alexander ordered the old, most senior generalissimo Antipater, a companion of Alexander’s father, from Greece to Babylon. Antipater refused to obey. Antipater’s youngest son was Alexander’s page. Alexander found himself ceasing to be, before he could even organize his affairs.

We are both everything and nothing relative to the universe. The key to wisdom, is to keep a balance.

Man, playing God, touches man, playing Adam. All very touching, self-obsessing, self-gratifying, self-glorifying mental, self-stimulation, and self-mutilation.

The universe is, what it is. Science can describe it, not explain how it came to be. That is the proper mood that wisdom should embrace. Embracing the humility of reality, so we can unleash the power of truth.

Let theologians, dinosaurian conservatives, the Politically Correct and the Perfect Cretins, among others, try to learn this: We have to embrace the way things are, before we can hope to change what needs to be changed. And there is plenty of the latter. So stop claiming some human beings know why there is all there is. They don’t. They, and, or, their supporters just want everything you could possibly imagine, and then more.

Patrice Aymé

Note 1: the comment above was an answer to: “Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing?
Posted on February 8, 2018 by Sean Carroll
A good question!

Or is it?”

In it, Sean points out notions which I have exposed in the past, but are worth repeating, as many physicists, let alone philosophers and theologians, don’t get them. First of all Sean basically points out that the universe just is (as I said above, by definition of this neuronal activity!). And secondly Sean Carroll, a famous Cal Tech cosmologist, points out that all too many professional physicists don’t even understand that physics, as presently understood, doesn’t explain the universe! In other words, as I have said for decades, all too many physicists take themselves for God! (That is in the same meta category as Niels Bohr’s famous retort to Albert Einstein:”Stop telling God what to do!“)

…“The right question to ask isn’t “Why did this happen?”, but “Could this have happened in accordance with the laws of physics?” As far as the universe and our current knowledge of the laws of physics is concerned, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The demand for something more — a reason why the universe exists at all — is a relic piece of metaphysical baggage we would be better off to discard.

This perspective gets pushback from two different sides. On the one hand we have theists, who believe that they can answer why the universe exists, and the answer is God. As we all know, this raises the question of why God exists; but aha, say the theists, that’s different, because God necessarily exists, unlike the universe which could plausibly have not. The problem with that is that nothing exists necessarily, so the move is pretty obviously a cheat. I didn’t have a lot of room in the paper to discuss this in detail (in what after all was meant as a contribution to a volume on the philosophy of physics, not the philosophy of religion), but the basic idea is there. Whether or not you want to invoke God, you will be left with certain features of reality that have to be explained by “and that’s just the way it is.” (Theism could possibly offer a better account of the nature of reality than naturalism — that’s a different question — but it doesn’t let you wiggle out of positing some brute facts about what exists.)

The other side are those scientists who think that modern physics explains why the universe exists. It doesn’t! One purported answer — “because Nothing is unstable” — was never even supposed to explain why the universe exists; it was suggested by Frank Wilczek as a way of explaining why there is more matter than antimatter. But any such line of reasoning has to start by assuming a certain set of laws of physics in the first place. Why is there even a universe that obeys those laws? This, I argue, is not a question to which science is ever going to provide a snappy and convincing answer. The right response is “that’s just the way things are.” It’s up to us as a species to cultivate the intellectual maturity to accept that some questions don’t have the kinds of answers that are designed to make us feel satisfied.”

Note 2: Swiss citizen Tariq Ramadan, the world’s most famous  Islamist propagandist, holder of two chairs (no less!) at Oxford University, and now in a French prison, was going around the world grievously beating and raping women. Why? Because, precisely, he wanted everything, and that included beating up handicapped women. Even now, as he sits in prison, he enjoys his power: immensely powerful organizations behind him, the sort who made him an Oxford Don, are threatening many more women, who also want to file complaints against Ramadan, but are afraid to do so. The human species is naturally metaphysical. Ramadan wanted to create a universe where he and his ilk could hurt and terrorize women at will. This is not any different from telling us that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem, the capital of Israel, on a winged horse: it is outrageous, but it creates a universe, and its cause (and in this case Islamists are the cause of said universe!)