Trade Deficit Madness, From Ancient Rome To Modern Trump Card

Warning; Roman Semi Direct Democracy Collapsed Because Of Global Trade:

Trade is a crucial subject: it’s about who has work, thus who has power, and who has an occupation deemed worthy. In the last massive global trade system we had, with 25% of world population, the core, Italy and Greece got emptied, in nearly all ways, by global trade.

This made “We The Peoples” of the core of the empire weak, unmotivated, incompetent, and finally completely impotent in all ways, especially politically: Rome went from a somewhat Direct Democratic Republic to  a military and then dynastic dictatorship.

I explained all this in great details in many essays: the similarities with the present planetary situation are more than alarming. Roman plutocracy exploded, when the wealthiest and their corporations were able to evade Roman laws by going global. Just as US and EU laws are evaded by going global.

Unsustainable. This is not just dinero they are taking, or work, or power, its the very substance of the essence of democracy.

Obama, in particular, put lipstick on that global pig, by passing outrageous, highly visible banking laws which amounted to saying that only plutocrats could span the world: everybody else who pretended to live on both sides of an ocean, was a criminal.  

Unfortunately most people talking about the subject of trade are hyper partisan: they just want their own networks to gain, or conserve power so they can profit from it. It’s true from the right wing globalist exploiters long in power and their servants (Krugman, etc.) and its associated overlords of the Deep State.

There is also the fact that seriously deranged hyper partisanship has become big business…

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So Trump imposes tariffs on Europe. Europe retaliates, as threatened, imposing, among other things, tariffs on (extremely polluting) Harley Davidson motorcycles. Harley Davidson CEO Matthew S Levatich says:

“Our decision to move some of our operations is 100% based on President Trump’s tariffs. Mr. Trump knows nothing about economics and even less about trade. The man is a moron.“

Supposedly left-wing organization like “Occupy Democrats” are so happy:

Complete anti-Trump hysteria by ignorant twerps. The owners of that site are making money hand over fist.

“Occupy Democrats” is actually a for profit site. It was founded by twins born in Mexico, one of whom became an investment banker.  They won’t talk money, but they are thriving. BuzzFeed’s Silverman estimates they could be making six figures in advertising revenues every month. The site is dogged by fact-checkers, sued by a competitor, mocked by conservatives. But nevermind, hordes of the tribally hating march in unison, excoriating Trump… for things Obama did, or the US long did.

US has a gigantic trade deficit with… Ireland! Why? Tax evasion! Ireland is one of many tax havens within Europe, encouraged by the EU, so many US corporations use it that way. Per head the deficit of US with Ireland is 32 times what it is with France…

Trade deficit US with EU is $122 billion. With China, $375 billion. EU-China deficit: $176billion. Are those irresisted increases in deficit sustainable? No. What’s the main cause? Evasion by EU & US corporations of tax & work laws in EU and US. Harley claims it has to leave the US because of European tariffs, but it  is going to India, not Europe! Wrong! And an obvious lie: Harley long prepared its move to India.

Now agreed, India, a high tech country with cheap labor should be freed to receive Harley, and Harley to go there. So far, so good. However the trade with India should be balanced. Otherwise it is colonialism, pure and simple. Not just colonialism, bad colonialism.

 

Why is the situation with China alarming? The ignorant out there, have been properly misinformed by the plutocratic media which loves them to death. Total sales of Chinese products in the USA is above 500 billion dollars. What’s the total sales of products in the USA? 1.5 trillion dollars, triple that. So for the value of three products sold in the US, one third of this value is made in China. And typically this represents high added value. And the reciprocal is just 20%. How long can the working class take this?

 

The globalists who engineered Obama and his ilk are besides themselves with anxiety at this point: the global trade system is how they are gathering power, same as their predecessors in Rome, 21 centuries ago. Collapse them, collapse the future they had set-up for themselves and their descendants.

Globalism, its tax avoidance, and avoidance of laws and regulations, its exploitation of oversea territories, making deals with local potentates, is how plutocracy is getting ever more powerful. Yes, they demonstrated their power by giving a Nobel Prize to Obama which the whole planet could see he didn’t deserve. So Obama did what they wanted him to do: demonstrate further power by droning babies to death in countries the USA was not even at war with. Yes, they are mighty, but the struggle is not over. We are mighty too, we are mighty still, and enough with their lies!

Patrice Ayme

EXISTENCE MEANS WAR: the Case of France, Western Civilization

No country, arguably, has a fiercer and longer military history than France. Only China compares… Not coincidentally, these two are the two longest running civilizations (all Western

However, not really, since China, like India, was composed of several very different ethnicities, until very recent times (whereas France was all united under the Romans for centuries, before her name switched from “Gallia” to “Francia”… even then, the language, the lingua Franca, didn’t change; France had one language, Latin, which displaced three underlying Celtic languages; China had around 100 languages, although with one writing system… India, several, of both languages and alphabets).

The history of the world is the history of victories, military or philosophical (philosophical includes religious). Countries such as the Central State, China, exists, because they didn’t lose crucial battles, or when China did lose to Genghis Khan, and then Ogedei, Chinese civilization awed the Khans enough for them to spare it

This drastic solution had been cooly proposed by Mongol generals, after the crushing Mongol victory, to solve once and for all time, the Chinese problem, by eradicating China’s population and ecology, solving the Chinese problem many Mongols thought they had… The Mongols didn’t to China what they had done to the Xi Xia (annihilated). 

The Mongols did annihilate several highly original civilizations. And mauled others beyond recognition, destroying their spirits. For example the Mongols eradicated the Republican spirit in Russia, along with all its independence, for three centuries. In Baghdad they extinguished enlightened Islam…  

France is the successor state of Rome: the first king of the Franks was Roman imperator (he had the “imperium”), and Roman Consul. France could only exist through a long string of victories… What Rome got deprived of in the few decades during which the Occidental Part of the empire collapsed. 

French victories were most notable against the Muslims. It was crucial, considering what the Muslim invaders and their Islamist ideology did in North Africa: a ferocious, total eradication not just of North African history, but of the will to civilization, the defeat of Islam was the defining moment of Western history. As the great historian of Rome Edward Gibbon observed. Gibbon said in a famous passage that had the Muslims won at Poitiers in 732 CE (or Toulouse, in 721 CE or Narbonne in 737 CE, the city itself being evacuated by the Islamists in 759 CE):

“the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”

And considering what Islam ended up doing to intellectuals (for example punishing printing with death, as the Ottoman Empire did for centuries)… It would have been the end of civilization. Instead, as I have alleged, in all appearance, the repeated exterminations of the Muslim invaders in France brought the collapse of the Arab Umayyad dynasty in 750 CE (destroying the myth of the Arab Caliphate just then: after that the influence of Iran was overwhelming…)

Russia and Ukraine were abandoned to their sad fate when the Mongol “Golden Horde” invaded them in the 13C (and Russia has not forgotten). However, not so for the rest of Europe: pretty much all of Europe was molded by the large empire Francia created and was the center of. (Including more or less directly Scandinavia, as the kingdom of Denmark waged a long war against France, starting under Charlemagne when it refused to return Saxon refugees and lords.)

From there on, Russia resented Western Europe, for child abandonment… Hence the jostling for power with France in the Middle East, which brought the Crimean War. (To some extent, Putin is repeating the pattern…)

Capture of Crucial Tower During the Siege of Sevastopol, Crimea, 1855. Notice the pretty red pants of the French army. From a Provence plant. German gunners found those scarlet pants most practical for target practice in 1914, when the French army suffered up to 23,000 killed in one day during unsuccessful counterattack (before successfully counterattacking 2 weeks later). This a painting by French painter Vernet, not plutocratic-we-own-the-world-because-we-say-so  thug like “Getty”…

The military might of France, driven by her central position, history and demography, was considerable: not only the French invaded England, creating the UK we have now, but at Bouvine in 1214 CE, a grand coalition including England and the Roman-German empire, was defeated by Philippe Auguste. And on it went: fascist Catholic Spain was ultimately broken by France, creating the Netherlands in the process.

The war of Spain against France lasted two centuries. Its initial aim was for some Spaniards to capture the French possessions in Southern Italy and Sicily which had been wrestled from the Muslims, centuries prior.

The war of France with ultra-militaristic, fascist and racist Prussia started in the mid 18C. Prussia was financed by Britain, and things didn’t go well for France, which lost the 1756-1763 world war (7 year war, “Indian and French war” in Americanese). Ultimately, though, Prussia and its thought system (racism, anti-Judaism, anti-Slavism, ultra militarization, etc.) were annihilated in 1945, in ALL ways.

Animated by a spirit of vengeance, France created the American Republic (king Louis XVI was warned that he was creating a republic in America; he shrugged that off). France won that war against the UK, but the financial cost was so great, that the French Revolution ensued (not only French agents contributed to the insurrection, but France provided more than 90% of the ammunition used by the American rebels. The war finished with two French armies (generals Rochambeau, Lafayette) converging on the besieged British army blockaded by the French fleet (admiral D’Estaing).

Since the Napoleonic era, or, rather, the Napoleonic error, France won many victories. Some were military, some philosophical (but with major military consequences). The military victories enabled France to keep on existing (Europe too). The philosophical ones, well, as Chou En Lai said, when asked to evaluate the French Revolution, it’s too early to tell how much impact they will have on humanity.

 

France defeated the pirates and potentates of Algeria (1830), then occupied and modernized this enormous country (half of my family is from, so I guess I am a French victory too!).

French and British armies and fleets defeated China, which had to make a number of treaties, opening up to trade and the world (1856-1860;1884-1885; UK got a tiny help from the USA).

France and Britain, mostly France, defeated Russia in Crimea (in many ways reminiscent of today’s demons.).

 

France crushed the Austrian empire at the battles of Magenta and Solferino (24 June 1859). That freed Italy from Austria, creating Italy as a state. And even a nation. Ironically, later the dictator Benito Mussolini would force Northern Italians to speak “Italian” (whereas before they often spoke other languages closer to French, or German…)

 

France lost the war of 1870–1871 with Prussia. However, when Prussia, now the German empire attacked to finish the French Republic in August 1914, it nearly lost its entire army six weeks later (First battle of the Marne). Ultimately, after enormous losses, and thanks to delayed but considerable British help, France won, and had won even before the USA came fully to the rescue of victory (France had cut off the German food supply in the south, and the entry of the USA in the war had cut off Germany from crucial US help through the hypocritical Netherlands!)

France declared war to the Nazis (September 3, 1939). Victory was delayed several years by the stupendous and improbable loss of the Battle of France (deadliest battle on the western front in WWII). That was lost through a combination of bad luck, treason (Duke of Wales told Hitler of the Allied weak point), major incompetence of the French commander (who was warned by his second in command of exactly what happened), fighting Germans battle hardened in Spain for four years (thus superior tactics and training in the first week, when the battle was lost).

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The next crucial French victory was Bir Hakeim, a modern Thermopylae, but with a much lethal, yet positive outcome (June 1942). The French were around 3,300 men (and one woman!) Those heroes resisted incredible pounding, preventing Rommel’s Afrika Korps from encircling the defeated British Eighth army, by stopping him for weeks. Half of the force was evacuated in the end, half died on the spot.

The French Republic won the Algerian war, militarily (using torture, true, but so did the other side, which was also in terrorist bombing against innocent civilians). However, De Gaulle was an epistolary racist and wanted Algeria cut off from France. France was also getting enormous pressure from the USSR and the USA to become a secondary power (“decolonization”), so he treacherously gave Algeria to a party of thugs, the FNL (which still has it, complete with the last surviving character from the 1950s as dictator).

There were other French victories, of a more subtle type: the leaders of Communist China and Vietnam were instructed, not to say indoctrinated by French Communists in Paris. When negotiating with them, French Socialists gave them half of Vietnam. Many in France viewed the “defeat” in Vietnam as a victory (of French Communism!).

The greatest French victory of all was the establishment of the United Nations (the SDN, prototype of the UN in which the US refused to partake, was actually a French idea from 1916, later captured by US racist president Wilson, the guy who operated a U-turn in World War One, when he saw that the Franco-British victory was in the cards… said victory was delayed by the collapse of Russia, itself due to the Kaiser allying himself with Lenin and his henchmen…)

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Conclusion: The history of the West, post-Rome is pretty much the history of France. By 800 CE, Francia had officially “renovated the Roman empire”… And the Eastern Roman empire, saved by the annihilation of three successive Islamist invasions of France (721 CE to 748 CE) could only agree. In 846 CE several Frankish army  annihilated the Muslims who had raided Rome, burned the Vatican.(one army was headed by Frankish Dux Guy… often Guy is presented as a “Lombard” because the Franks decided they were Lombards… after, and because having defeated the Lombards. Actually Charlemagne proudly wore their Iron Crown; the Lombards, Long Beards, had come into Italy from Northern Germany, and occupied it for two centuries before the Franks consented to submit them to stop the whining of the Popes, who the Franks tortured… through the Lombards…)

And what of China? China, by my own reckoning, spent 6 centuries under foreign occupation, most of it under the “Jurchen” later self-relabelled as “Manchus”. However the Mongol invasions and occupation were a near-death experience. China is mightier than ever

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Morality: Sometimes, war should give peace a chance. Yet, without war, by those states most advanced in matters philosophical, not only peace has no chance, but nor does civilization. Philosophical correctness means you can’t have your dictator and eat it. If you want to eat it, you have to make war. That’s French lesson number one.

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: I allude above to one of the scariest moment of history. The most capable and efficient general Subotai was put in charge of the assault against the Jin in their emergency capital of Kaifeng. Subotai wished to massacre the whole of the population, and change the ecology (from agricultural to pastoral, Mongol style). But fortunately for the North Chinese, general Yelu Chucai was more humane, wiser, and under his advice Ogodei rejected the cruel suggestion of eradication which had befallen many civilizations which opposed the Mongols, including the longest existing and mightiest Buddhist empire of the Xiaxia.

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Note 2: The preceding essay was motivated by an impudent, ignorant, dumb and offensive (“troll-like”) question in Quora: “Did France have any major combat victories since the Napoleonic era?”

 

Mathematical Beauty, Physics, And Truth

Mathematical beauty can guide physics: this is what happened for the foundation of QED by Dirac. At least, so it looks at first sight, and so he said. However, Dirac was guided by one intuition deeper than “beauty”: finding an equation of maximum simplicity to describe the electron… while knowing the Klein Gordon relativistic equation didn’t describe the electron, finding a simpler (first order) PDE that would be “relativistic” guided his search. Then see what happened. He knew that the simple wave equation are first order (although conventional strings are second order PDEs). Doing so Dirac re-invented unknowingly part of Cartan Spinor theory, a pure mathematical theory invented 15 years earlier. The Dirac equation he found led to experimental predictions, which were found to be true.

General Relativity too had a mathematical origin: Riemann, in the 1860s, got the idea that force will manifest itself as a deviation of geodesics. The idea is actually even older, in 3 dimensions, going back to Buridan (1350). That’s how Buridan superseded Aristotelian physics with his “Impetus” theory (the first order of the mechanics we have now).

Special Relativity was invented differently: a number of equations were found to explain effects observed, until Poincaré built a coherent logical whole resting on the idea that the speed of light should always be measured to be c. In particular electromagnetism was found to the essence of Relativity.

The picture is from CERN. The waves are from beaches of Western North America. Ultimately, it seems likely to me that nonlinear phenomenon are needed to understand hydraulics in full. But present day hydraulics, like Quantum Physics (away from collapse), is linear…

So the opposition is not so much between mathematics and physics, it’s between shallow ideas and deeper ideas. Physicists had no deeply new ideas, ideas which can stand-under, understand, for generations. Much of that has to do with denying that the Foundations of Quantum Physics are worthy of consideration.

Mathematical beauty can guide physics: but who guides mathematical beauty? 23 centuries ago, mathematicians then in power decided that Euclidean mathematics was beautiful, and non-Euclidean mathematics (invented prior) was ugly. Let’s not talk of the ugly anymore, or, at least, too complicated, they opined. After a few generations of pounding that notion, it became a claim that nothing existed in geometry, but for the beauty of geometry in a plane. Mathematicians got so dumb they forgot that the axiom of parallels was just an axiom, not a theorem (they tried to demonstrate it for nearly 20 centuries, whereas it would take ten seconds to explain to them what idiots they were, had they a brain in that direction…)

Indeed, never mind that Pytheas of Marseilles and his successors had, thanks to spherical geometry, computed the size of the rounded Earth most precisely. So, clearly mathematics on a sphere was extremely useful! In particular, true, and in existence!

Some say equation are beautiful. Equations themselves are subjects to interpretations. For example Henri Poincaré’s E = mcc, rolled out at the Sorbonne in 1899, is not clear. Similarly Einstein GR equation, basically: Curvature – Mass-energy, is not clear, as Einstein pointed out: right side is ill defined. After Dirac discovered his equation he realized it had to live in “Spinor Space”. So interpreting an equation gave the space where it had meaning.

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Right now the most fundamental problems in mathematics and physics are clear to yours truly:

First, mathematics use an infinity axiom, namely that there is infinity. In the formal language of the Zermelo–Fraenkel axioms, the axiom reads: There is a set I (the set which is postulated to be infinite), such that the empty set is in I, and such that whenever any x is a member of I, the set formed by taking the union of x with its singleton {x} is also a member of I. Such a set is sometimes called an inductive set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_infinity

This, this Infinity Axiom, in my opinion supposes too much, relative to the physical and practical realms, just like Euclidean geometry supposed too much relative to the practical and physical realms. Indeed, in practice, flat geometry does not exist. Same for infinity: in practice infinity cannot exists (not enough particles to count all the numbers). The Infinity Axiom introduces infinities in physics which are a mathematical artefact. This philosophical point is too hard for most top theorists to understand, the ones the Wall Street Journal is in love with (because of there are leading minds officially sanctioned in physics, thus as higher principles, so it is in in economics, sociology, hence plutocracy is rightfully supreme; see below).

Second, Quantum Physics is about WAVES. This enormous conceptual breakthrough was from Louis de Broglie. Waves are beautiful, especially Quantum Waves. Yet, in practice, waves are NOT linear. They are often nearly linear, right, but not quite (just like Euclidean geometry doesn’t quite exist, except as a figment of the imagination, and even then… ). However, present day mathematics has not been focused on nonlinear waves, so we don’t have a notion of “mathematical beauty”of nonlinear waves.

And guess what? The formalism of quantum Physics itself says that the “collapse” it can’t do without is nonlinear.

And now for a word of wisdom from that rather tall little thief friend of ours, Richard P. Feynman: “Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.” There has been too much self dealing in physics, too much nonsense at the highest level! Bohr’s philosophy, which underlays his satisfaction with the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, is a surrealistic horror: he thought that clarity contradicted truth (or idea to this effect… actually the exact contradiction of the beautiful idea of equation).

Want new physics? Do like Buridan, Oresme, and their friends and students, seven centuries ago: invent new mathematics (they invented the second page of calculus, the first one was from Archimedes himself, 16 centuries before). That’s done by working on the axioms, introducing new ones.

So when is a system of thought X deeper than another Y? When X implies Y, by under-standing it, namely introducing deeper (“under”) reasons for its standing.

String theory has been the equivalent of the crystal spheres and epicycles construction which replaced the evidence all could see, that Earth, the small thing turned around the Sun, the big thing (the Greeks knew from computations, looking at the Moon, and shadows, that the Sun was millions of kilometers away…) Right now the big thing is Quantum Collapse, that’s what needs to be understood. String Theory does a few things, like cancelling some infinities as a problem (my proposal above is much more radical… also, unavoidable…)

Meanwhile, while those self-esteemed super brains make super theories of supersymmetries of super strings (their concepts involve the word”super” very much…), to make a theory of Quantum Gravity, little Patrice has noticed this: there is NO experiment, and, a fortiori theory of gravity in the double slit… Why? Because the super minds, too busy being super, have not noticed that we lack experiments there (after they read this, they will steal the idea, and run to the closest physics journal edited by their friends to publish it as their great insight).

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: the preceding was inspired by the following WSJ article:

Einstein’s character was more like that of an artist than a scientist, his older son, Hans, said: The great physicist reserved his highest praise for theories that are beautiful, rather than ones that merely fit the facts. When, in the latter half of his career, Einstein spent most of his time trying to discover a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism, he paid little attention to new experiments and focused mainly on trying to find the best mathematical structure. Alas, the strategy got him nowhere.

According to the physicist and prolific blogger Sabine Hossenfelder, Einstein and others who work in a similar way are “lost in math,” the title of her lively and provocative book. Until the early 1970s, few theoreticians fitted such a description—most of them were taking inspiration from the results of experiments. It was this strategy that led them to the so-called Standard Model, which describes the inner workings of atoms with remarkable success. Over the past four decades, however, theoretical physics has gone astray, in Ms. Hossenfelder’s view. Part of the problem, she feels, is that so many theoreticians have allowed themselves to be seduced by the aesthetic appeal of mathematical theories that are going nowhere.

As she explains, the use of beauty as a proxy for truth has an impressive pedigree: Not only was it espoused by Einstein, it also became the obsession of the almost comparably brilliant English quantum physicist Paul Dirac. In 1975 he wrote: “If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand . . . along an unexpected path, path where new vistas open up . . . from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.” Toward the end of his life, he declared that any theoretical physicist who disagreed with him should give up research and do something else.

As a result of this misguided focus on beauty, Ms. Hossenfelder says, her generation of theoretical physicists has been “stunningly unsuccessful.” The multiverse—the idea that our universe is only one of a vast number—is one of the fashionable concepts that she believes is a dud… 

Ms. Hossenfelder believes string theorists are deluded. “Nature doesn’t care” about mathematical beauty, she declares. Clever physicists have been led up the garden path before, she stresses, pointing to the once-fashionable theories of the ether that Einstein later demonstrated to be redundant.

Ms. Hossenfelder has paid a high price for her counter-orthodoxy…”

And the WSJ to conclude by discreetly celebrating the Fuhrerprinzip which Hossenfelder violated:

“The best string theorists are confident that they are heading in the right direction not only because of the theory’s mathematical beauty but because of its huge potential, despite its formidable challenges.

When Ms. Hossenfelder reiterates in her final chapter that many of the world’s most accomplished theorists are “lost in math,” we cannot help wondering whether it is she who is lost. Time will tell whether many of the world’s leading theoretical physicists have spent decades barking up the wrong tree. Meanwhile, it is pleasing to read that Ms. Hossenfelder now has a research grant and has resumed work on the subject she plainly cares deeply about, no doubt steering well clear of what she regards as bandwagons. In that respect, at least, Einstein would have been proud of her.”

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After the plutocratic horror critique above, I must re-establish some justice to Sabine (and myself, indirectly). Here is Nature:

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray Sabine HossenfelderBasic (2018)

“Why should the laws of nature care about what I find beautiful?” With that statement, theoretical physicist and prolific blogger Sabine Hossenfelder sets out to tell a tale both professional and personal in her new book, Lost in Math. It explores the morass in which modern physics finds itself, thanks to the proliferation of theories devised using aesthetic criteria, rather than guidance from experiments. It also charts Hossenfelder’s own struggles with this approach.

Hossenfelder — a research fellow specializing in quantum gravity and modifications to the general theory of relativity at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany — brings a trenchant new voice to concerns that have been rumbling in physics for at least two decades. In 2006, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics and Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong fired the first salvos at the trend of valuing mathematical elegance over empirical evidence. Both books took on string theory, a ‘theory of everything’ in which the fundamental constituents of nature are strings vibrating in many more spatial dimensions than the familiar three. Since its entry into mainstream physics in the mid-1980s, the theory has failed to make predictions that would unambiguously verify or falsify it.

Hossenfelder, too, tackles string theory, but her broadsides are more basic. She points to the paucity of experimental data, exacerbated as the machines needed to probe ever higher energies and smaller distances become more costly to build. Given that, she is worried that too many theorists are using mathematical arguments and subjective aesthetics to judge a theory’s validity.”

By the way, my own theory of Quantum Foundations predicts Dark Matter and Dark Energy… It also predicts unpredicted, in contradiction-with Einstein, mass behavior in, say the 2-slit experiment… Namely a dispersion of mass during translation…

Here is more of Nature:

For example, Hossenfelder questions the desire for naturalness — the idea that a theory should not be contrived or have parameters that have to be fine-tuned to fit observations. The standard model of particle physics feels like such a contrivance to many physicists, despite its spectacular success in predicting particles such as the Higgs boson, discovered at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. In the theory, to prevent the mass of the Higgs from ballooning beyond reasonable bounds, certain parameters have to be set just so, rather than be derived from first principles. This smacks of unnaturalness.

To get rid of this ugliness, physicists developed supersymmetry — an elegant theory in which every known particle has a hypothetical partner particle. Supersymmetry made the Higgs mass natural. It also showed how three of the four fundamental forces of nature would have been one at energies that existed shortly after the Big Bang (an aesthetically pleasing scenario). It even unexpectedly provided a particle, the neutralino, that could explain dark matter — matter that is unseen, yet thought to exist because of its observed gravitational effect on galaxies and galactic clusters. Hossenfelder explains that in combining everything that theoretical physicists value (symmetry, naturalness, unification and unexpected insights), supersymmetry has become “what biologists fittingly call a ‘superstimulus’ — an artificial yet irresistible trigger”.

WHEN DIRECT DEMOCRACY FAILED: ATHENS LOST HER MIND, FIRST, THEN POWER (Fall of Real Democracy I)

Hatred is a loving mistress… Let’s thank those nasty enough to advertise the notion (in the USA a famous PC actor suggested to rape the son of the president)… But there is worse than the excesses hatred brings: one could verse in the opposite extreme, and lose passions enough to sink in the morass of mercantilism, while the spirit of the highest passions breaks down (liberty, critical thinking, fraternity, equality).

This collapse of the towering will to liberty, critical thinking, fraternity, equality happened to Athens at a vulnerable point of her history. Thus a dispirited Athens didn’t fight to death, as she had many times before. The Macedonian dictator Antipater, senior general of Philip and Alexander, was able to take advantage (although it required two sea battles). We, humanity, lost Direct Democracy. We haven’t recovered it yet! (Losses on the battlefield of the best Athenians may explain some of the lack of enthusiasm)

In an imaginable history, Athens would have durably installed her empire, as a constellation of allied Direct Democracies all the way to Massalia, and beyond, incorporated later Rome as junior partner… Etc.

However, it’s not too late. We need to recover what the Athenians had, and do it better, and on a planetary scale. It’s like talking to Kim Un Jung, chairman of nuclear armed North Korea: no choice. And much more important.

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Consider how Greece went from democracies to kings: after Thebes won a costly tactical victory at the battle of Mantinea, in 362 BCE, which was a strategic defeat, Thebes and its Boeotian League saw its influence wane, and Athens became supreme again. One would have expected Athens to use the occasion to rebuild vigorously its empire.

 

The power of Athens is overlooked today. Here it is, in picture. Panathenaic stadium by the Athenian statesman Lykourgos (Lycurgus) c. 330 BC, primarily for the Panathenaic Games. It was rebuilt in marble by Herodes Atticus, an Athenian Roman senator, by 144 AD and had a capacity of 50,000 seats. The stadium was used for the relaunch of the Olympic Games by Baron de Coubertin. The Olympic Games, started in 776 BCE continued for nearly 12 centuries, until Catholic thus Super Fascist Roman Emperor Theodosius I decreed in 393 CE that all such “pagan cults” should be banned.

An alternate history where Athens leads civilization is entirely conceivable, and we came very close to that. For example the battle of Chaeronea of Greek city states against the invading Philip of Macedonia, in 338 BCE, could have been won. The battle was in balance for several hours, before the Macedonian crushed both wings of the poleis. Indeed, Sparta was not at Chaeronea. Had it been there, it is likely that Philip and his self-made army would have been extinguished. but, well, Sparta was clearly dispirited, after two defeats at the hands of Thebes (Leuctra and Mantinea).

Athens population (whole of the peninsula of Attikḗ, including women, children) was probably 300,000, and the Delian League also known as the Athenian empire was more than one million (a population comparable to Rome then, and a much greater area, lots of it, sea, and a state which was the world’s most advanced technologically… differently from Rome, which, then, didn’t even have one warship!).

Athens had industry (manned by slaves), its added value products were highly valued in antiquity. She also had a large population with lots of foreign borns. It needed lots of food, but Attica, one of the driest part of Greece, couldn’t produce it. So Athens imported “grain” from the Black Sea shores which came through, thanks to its ally Byzantium. When that occasionally faltered, grain would come from the Greek colony in Cyrenaica (yes, Libya). In any case, long trade routes enabled Athens to exist.

Athens needed an empire to survive. (Differently from the present USA, which is, like Russia, a self-sufficient empire… more so than say China.. However Europe is not self-sufficient, as long as it is fossil fuels dependent… it gets its oil and gas from all around, from Algeria to Siberia…)

There was another problem in the Fourth Century BCE: no Greek polis (= City-State) was powerful enough to dominate Greece, and thus to become sizable enough a power to resist the colossal power of the fascist Persian empire to the east. The Persian empire was a global plutocratic power, a violent hierarchy of tyrannies and mighty governors, all at the mercy of cruel end-of life treatments such as being split by trees slowly, or even more slowly, eaten by worms while entrapped, well fed, between boats). The potentiality of such violence guaranteed its precautionary usage, as soon as possible (the Macedonian courts worked pretty much along the same one, and thus it’s no wonder Macedônia, led by Aléxandros ho Mégas, conquered Persia: qui se ressemble, s’assemble….)

Persia ruled from the Mediterranean all the way to modern Afghanistan and Pakistan. On the Mediterranean shores,  Persia was occupying and terrorizing the Greek democracies spread along what is now the Turkish coast.

Persia was a superpower, but it was a fascist plutocracy, somewhat malevolent, civilizationally and spiritually opposed to the Greek poleis. Plutocracy (Persia) is antagonistic to direct democracy and a mentally creative civilization (as found in the greatest Greek cities).

Hence the war between Persia and (mostly) Athens: it was directly related to the mental creativity of Athens. By the third quarter of the Fourth Century (after circa 350 CE), Athens and Persia had been at war for 150 years, much of it with Persia using its gold to launch other Greek city states against Athens (such as Sparta, which won the Peloponnesian war against Athens in the end because Persia bought it a fleet so big and good, it destroyed the Athenian navy, by surprise).

The war between Greece and Persia had been caused fundamentally by the irremediable antagonism between intellectual fascism (Persia) and mental creativity (Athens).

However, by 360 BCE, Athens’ creativity and mental exuberance had been broken. Meeting of the Ecclesia were more like shareholders meetings (it was written at the time). Instead of writing new, rash literary works. “Classics” became an obsession, and the “classical” mood paralysed new mental creation: none of the writings then have survived, or then they care more about gossip than grand conceptions. The art, even in simple pottery, also decayed, going from manly themes to superficial stuff. Some “feminists” and PC or New Age imbeciles may object to what I just said, and would call be names (that’s what they do best). However, they don’t understand that it’s brute force which enables them to exist.

(Canadians, for example, love to pose as pacifists, equal opportunity, wealthy from honest work. But their wealth and peace comes from having massacred the Natives and the environment, and also the French… In general European colonies of the Anglo-Saxon type find easy to give moral lessons, as they eradicated, annihilated and holocausted their potential opposition, prior… Some will scoff: but watch Trudeau: he speaks PC, while exploiting the dirtiest oil on the planet. Money speaks best, when it makes its victim believe its lies)

Indeed, when you are surrounded by barbarians, and, even worse, Persians, half-civilized, half-savage, horrendously efficient in war, the military aspect of civilization has to be prime (something the USA has understood very well… for centuries, and France, for 17 centuries, clearly: the Frankish confederation was primarily a military organization, and succeeded to do, on a much grander scale what the Greeks tried to do: consider the Athenian empires, and the Boeotian federation).

Some will object that I called the Persians, “savage” (and that’s not PC! And Phocion started it, and he was a very good man). But they were. Savage. The Persians. It’s not just about Persians. The Athenian general Phocion, learning that the Ecclesia was going to take measures against Macedonia, exclaimed:”Why would you provoke that savage man?” The “savage man” was the twenty year old Alexander (soon to be “the Great”). Alexander (with Antipater, and thousands of Athenian prisoners just liberated) had visited Athens. The Athenians met Alexander in person. Alexander had crushed them in battle with his cavalry. Phocion was right. Soon Alexander annihilated Thebes: killing all men, and boys, selling surviving women and children into slavery. A sort of warning to Athens, and everybody else, no doubt.  

Plutocracy has imposed itself, worldwide, by disguising its existence. The massive and crucial support of US plutocracy, between 1914 and 1945 to the worst animus in Germany, has been successfully obliterated from the official version of history.

These propaganda coups and massive distortions of real history can be sleekly done, because we don’t have Direct Democracy anymore: after all, we don’t have an ecclesia, an assembly of We the People, where everybody can debate. Raucous disagreement, as Athens had, has disappeared!

I cannot go out there, as many a philosopher in Athens did, and open up on the powers that be, for all the people to see (Socrates didn’t do this, instead his students established a dictatorship in Athens; but Socrates’ present repute is much exaggerated; other philosophers, including several close friend or married to Pericles, played a much more important role than Socrates, in the evolution of civilization; for example Pericles’ second wife, from the Ionian coast, established the notion of “Open Society” which Pericles advertised in his famous Funeral Oration…) Instead, here I am writing hopefully for the future…

In theory we could adapt the political structures to the new technology, and relaunch Direct Democracy: human beings have adapted to new technological possibilities for more than two million years.

We could go out there, and make our opinion known: after all, the Internet gives us those powers, at least, potentially. Those powers of debate. We need Athenian Direct Democracy back. After all, we now have robots to do most of the work (overruling an objection of Aristotle who correctly pointed out that Athens couldn’t do without slaves as the Greeks didn’t have machines for everything). We, We The People, can concentrate on the work Athenian philosophers used to do: thinking right, or, at least, better!

Patrice Ayme

Separating Children From Parents: A Crime. Not Fixing Guatemala Also A Crime

In my general semantics, plutocracy is exactly what that word says: the evil (Pluto) power (kratia). Plutocracy, the Dark Side ruling, is not just about money ruling (it’s a point on which I am in agreement with the mythical Jesus…) Sob story in New York Times about a mother separated from her son, then sent back to Guatemala, while her son, 8 years old, is left in the tender loving care of US judges. (Horrendous stories about babies and toddlers crying on the floor by the hundreds, torn from their deported parents, are circulating in the comment section of the New York Times.)

‘I Can’t Go Without My Son’:
A Deported Mother’s Plea
As a growing number of families are being separated as part of the Trump administration’s attempt to control illegal immigration, some parents are being deported without their children.

US tender loving care as its typical best. An officer at a detention center gave Elsa Ortiz a phone number to get in contact with her son, but said she was deported before she could use it. CreditMarian Carrasquero/The New York Times

To separate children from parents was practiced by Canada and Australia less than 60 years ago. It is recognized, by the United Nations’ law as a crime against humanity. It is especially horrendous when babies and toddlers are concerned.

Famously, the USA refused entry to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Nazi Germany, including Jews, in the 1930s and 1940-41. Most got stuck in France, and when France fell to the Nazis attack, dozens of thousands of these refugees were hunted across occupied France, found out, and then deported and assassinated by the Nazis.

However, Guatemala is not quite Nazi Germany. Yet if it is too much a place of criminal state activity (as the mother of that child asserts), it should be the duty of the US government to do something about it, at the government level.

Once again what happened with Nazism should be a guide: not only France accepted hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Nazis, but, finally, France declared war to the Nazis (September 3, 1939). That, unfortunately led to the fall and occupation of France ten months later (and death of many refugees, as I said). Yet, there was an overall beneficial effect: the Nazis were not ready for war in 1939, and thus ultimately lost it (in 1945… when the Nazis had initially intended to go to war, with enough weapons).

Conclusions: separating parent and child is borderline crime against humanity, no ifs and buts. However, a strong deterrent, indeed. A better, and much less controversial deterrent would be to bring US power to improve matters in, say, Guatemala, by bearing onto the government there. That’s absolutely needed! Precisely by bringing enough power, including economic sanctions against higher-ups, to change things there for a tolerable level, or, at least, mightily push in that direction!

Some will whine it didn’t work with Cuba, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and now Venezuela. But that’s not right. Gentle pressure worked well in several of these countries, and also Peru, Columbia, or, for that matter, South Africa. Law enforcement is a global problem. By letting plutocrats roam free and arrange the world to suit themselves, we encourage global crime.

Arguably, it’s even the other way around: take Mexico. Under the guise of privatizing, the Mexican government gave Carlos Slims, a fifth generation plutocrat, the national telecommunication company, for pennies on the dollar. Slims became the world’s wealthiest man (and greatest owner of New York Times class A shares…) So doing, corruption blossomed at the very highest level of Mexican government, hence encouraging it at all levels. Meanwhile the new class of power addicts in the USA got drugged on cocaine (as Obama proudly flaunts in his pseudo-auto biography), creating a huge demand for organized crime networks to export said cocaine in the US. Hence a gang war in Mexico, which killed more than 100,000, and incited many Mexicans to flee to the USA.

So the US can do more than put innocent eight year olds in prison, making them into orphans: instead, send US drug addicts of the highest type to prison, the sort which crow about their addiction in print … and push to clean Mexico, in part by doing so…

Patrice Ayme

Note 1: Attorney General Sessions claimed that illegal immigrants coming with children is a deliberate tactic, as it more than tripled in a few years, from 14,000 to 71,000… Hence the need for a crackdown. BTW, there is a Federal Law which says one can’t separate parent from child for more than a few days… Except for good judicial reason… Otherwise it’s definitively child abuse.

***

Note 2: DHS claims 10,000 children presently in the care of HHS (they are transferred from DHS to HHS within 72 hours) were sent separated from their parents, with strangers, and that’s how separation happened. Policy already existed under Obama. Trump says he “hates the policy”, asks Congress to change the law. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, says that 14,500 children came recently, WITHOUT PARENTS… And more than 11,000 are now under custody. (Total number of people arrested average 15,000 a month.)

250 children are caught a day… and send to school…

Organics on Mars? More Importantly, Water Long Ago, Now Ice Cliffs!

On this site, all sorts of essays are found. Some are on the cutting edge of research (and a subset of those may even be right! After all just one somewhat right, on a subject of significance, would justify all my efforts…). We live in times when, for the first time ever, the social Machiavellianism of a biological species, yours truly, has the fate of the biosphere, and maybe even of intelligent life in this galaxies, in its paws. That has got to have happened many times in the billions of galaxies, long ago and far away. But this is here now, and philosophy and its practical side, politics, are in the driver seat of the honor of intelligence in the Milky Way…

So here is the time to celebrate the little world next door, Mars. Mars, although half the linear dimensions of Earth, has exactly as much land as Earth (2/3 of Earth is sea). Recent discoveries have put Mars in a more habitable light.

Big picture for Mars remains that the rover is in what used to be a giant lake one hundred kilometers across. So Mars WAS HABITABLE. For about a billion years. Whether life evolved there is not clear: Earth is a giant churning engine of creation, with perhaps kilometer high tides at some point, every couple of hours or so… That forcefully mixed continent, sea, volcanoes, lightning, etc. If life had evolved on Mars, though, it would have transferred on Earth… thanks to impacts…

Ice Cliffs on Mars, 100 meters tall, took me by surprise… A happy surprise: without water on Mars, colonization a no-go

All this is much more agitated and eventful than the old picture…
Those towering, 100 meters high cliffs of ice on Mars. Last year. That makes Mars colonization feasible (once we have a huge energy source, like portable thermonuclear fusion…

NASA announced the discovery of organics on Mars. Ian Miller’s blog put that into perspective.
This sort of discoveries, ice cliffs now, and water four billion years ago, are more impactful than whether life evolved there. Hunting for fossils is how to solve that one… And will not be easy: 4 billion year old fossils on Earth are very controversial…

I am a bit impact and significance obsessed… in all matters. The hierarchy of all values comes from the hierarchy of significance. That Mars is colonizable, because it has water, is a huge piece of information, full of hope. A hope to spread humanity beyond our endangered cradle. But we don’t have all the technology we need yet: even if the cost of launches is brought as low as Elon Musk hopes (6 million dollars per launch of his giant BFR rocket, he claimed…), we don’t have an energy source for Mars: a worldwide dust storm has just plunged the planet in obscurity, and a solar powered rover had to shut itself down. (the Curiosity rover is nuclear powered, so it’s not affected… It was the last nuclear power pack, or so… Nuclear ain’t PC, you know…)

Pretty much we will need to develop controlled nuclear fusion to go melt those huge cliffs of ice… Some will scream at ecological devastation. Not so: right now, the European Union, this high temple of hypocrisy and things not being what they seem to be, import enough palm oil from South East Asia to kill all the Orangutans there… Among other life forms. And what does it do with all this food? Fuel! Fuel which the EU, in its colossal madness and criminal alacrity to invert all values, view as more important than life itself! Yes, most of the palm oil imported to Europe is turn into car exhausts…

Palm oil is one of the main engines of environmental destruction. Found in food and cosmetics, its growing use is destroying rainforests and endangering all species of much of the world. And indeed, more than half of all the palm oil imported by Europe is turned into biodiesel and blended into fuel (the US does the same with corn, but that’s more honest, less colonialist, as it is the US Middle West itself that is devastated by growing too much corn…)

Conquering the Solar System, colonizing it, will force us to use much more efficient techniques. Then we can recycle those new technologies on Earth, to reduce our impact on the home planet…So it is highly moral, not just games in space to feel better about ourselves, and distract us from gravitas. For example Photovoltaics (“PV”) used in space have nearly 50% efficiency, more than twice the one realized on the ground (they are also more expensive…) On the ISS, sweat and urine are 100% recycled…

Art, morality are children of our technology, itself the expression of science.

Patrice Ayme

 

Bitcoin Is Organized Crime

I have explained in the past what is fundamentally wrong with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: a currency is actually an expression of military and judicial might. A currency needs a state, or states, to back it up, and is a tool thereof: a state, or union of states, can exist without a currency, not reciprocally

Another problem with the concept of bitcoin is that crypto currencies rest on the the “blockchain”, a perfectly inefficient, energy devouring and thus ecologically criminal, idiotic technology… Which could be useful only if information and computation were ecologically free (instead I have proposed “AWE”… which is ultimate efficiency).

Indeed, the “blockchain” records all transactions everywhere, anytime… instead of some transactions by trusted actors. Bitcoin fanatics say they have a right to ravage the planet, because they don’t trust those “trusted” actors. Well, neither do I I say: make the actors (governments, and their agents, the banks) more trustworthy.

Bitcoiners have also insisted their activity was beyond any suspicion, it’s honest, it’s new age, it’s a new dawn, the geek world, better than anything the Greeks offered… Helpful bitcoiners sent me messages offering to educate me, in all sorts of ways. All this, in total violation of the simplest observation of the Bitcoin graph, which looks like a Tulip Mania. Just worse:

Market Capitalization of Cryptocurrencies dropped by ⅔, generating more than 200 billion dollars of losses.

And indeed, turning things on their heads, there is a new reason to criticize bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies: they are manipulated by organized crime. Bitcoin enthusiasts may counterpunch that central banks are organized crime; well, I agree, and wrote so for more than a decade; however, it’s not because Rome is on fire that one should start new fires! Bitcoin enthusiasts should go the way of Nero.

 

• New research observes that at least half of the 2017 rise in bitcoin prices was due to coordinated price manipulation using another cryptocurrency called tether.
• The 66-page paper says tether was used to buy bitcoin at carefully selected moments when it was declining, which helped “stabilize and manipulate” the cryptocurrency’s price.
• “In general I research things that are potentially illegal, and there’s a lot of rumors surrounding potential questionable activity in cryptocurrencies,” says University of Texas finance professor John Griffin, who has a decade-long track record of flagging fraud in financial markets.

Here is the paper’s abstract:

John M. Griffin

University of Texas at Austin – Department of Finance

Amin Shams

University of Texas at Austin – Department of Finance

Date Written: June 13, 2018

Abstract

This paper investigates whether Tether, a digital currency pegged to U.S. dollars, influences Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices during the recent boom. Using algorithms to analyze the blockchain data, we find that purchases with Tether are timed following market downturns and result in sizable increases in Bitcoin prices. Less than 1% of hours with such heavy Tether transactions are associated with 50% of the meteoric rise in Bitcoin and 64% of other top cryptocurrencies. The flow clusters below round prices, induces asymmetric autocorrelations in Bitcoin, and suggests incomplete Tether backing before month-ends. These patterns cannot be explained by investor demand proxies but are most consistent with the supply-based hypothesis where Tether is used to provide price support and manipulate cryptocurrency prices.

Keywords: Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Prices, Tether

Suggested Citation:

Griffin, John M. and Shams, Amin, Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered? (June 13, 2018). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=

***

Why was Bitcoin Organized geek Crime tolerated? Because those one bought, one owns! 

All this was long obvious. As it was that organized crime used Bitcoin (didn’t just manipulate it). A high level contractor of Google told me the government (under Obama) was perfectly aware, but let it run its course. That may look strange. But not so, once one has realized that the government knows that conventional banking is organized crime, a major engine of inequality, worldwide: bankers create money, and they create it, for their friends.

By letting Bitcoin run its perverse criminal course, many geeks made lots of money, getting ethically very dirty in the process, while growing in power and influence by leaps and bounds. Same general strategy as with holding the world economy hostage of monopolies (GAFA, FANG, etc.): all these dirty, wealthy people are now stakeholders in the engine of criminal inequality. Organized criminality got them there, and their now criminally confirmed minds make them most qualified to help run the world… as the little soldiers of dirt. They are all accomplices in crime, so they will shut up, cooperate, and subjugate. Thus geeks may as well implement the system, they are not just crucial to the system… They are it (or so they think, and thus will thereafter behave as the true holders of power want them to).

When Augustus seized the Roman Republic, and made it his personal thing, he was not alone: several millions stakeholders (mostly having to do with the Roman army, its suppliers, accomplices, etc.) were helping him out. He had cultivated them carefully. Same now.

 

Patrice Ayme

Will Starburst Galaxies Explode the Big Bang?

There are MUCH MORE GIANT STARS THAN EXPECTED IN THE UNIVERSE (Factor of ten?)

I have proposed that the Big Bang Model is wrong, and that the universe could be much older, of the order of 100 billion years old, not 13.8 billion years; my iconoclastic and inconsiderate reasoning was philosophical: we have one expansion mechanism, DARK ENERGY. That expansion, Dark Energy, was directly observed, it exists, it’s not a figment of imagination. Many a physicist made a sour face, as Dark Energy was not expected at all: hundreds of arrogant  claims to explain the whole universe, talk to the media and the gullible as if one were god, and then, next thing one knows, one’s theories don’t explain 95% of the universe…

So an insolent philosophy asked: ‘Why would we need another cosmic expansion mechanism?’ Especially one expansion mechanism NOT directly observed, a figment of the imagination, the so-called Inflaton Field, necessary to make the Big Bang theory work (because of arcane complications: basically the universe as observed is around 100 billion light years across, and can have got that big only if it expanded at 10^10 times the speed of light, or something like this… Confusing enough? I have explained what is going on here and there, such as the locality of the speed of light, and the embedding theorem of Lorentzian manifolds. Stay tuned…)

A (Non Spectacular) Starburst galaxy, the Cigar, 12 million light year away. Full starburst galaxies are very blue, from the giant extremely hot (thus blue) stars in their midst. How much do we know about Helium formation in such super giant stars? Philosophers want to know!

So why is the Big Bang necessary? Besides making some people more puffed up than god itself?

Inspired by the H bombs they were thoroughly familiar with, Gamow, Alpher and Herman proposed the hot Big Bang as a means to produce all of the elements: extreme heat caused collisions and the nuclei fused (from the “STRONG FORCE”).

The lightest elements (hydrogen, helium, deuterium, lithium) were produced in the Big Bang nucleosynthesis

Ms. Burbidge, Mr. Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle worked out the nucleosynthesis processes that go on in stars, where the much greater density and longer time scales allow the triple-alpha process (He+He+He –>> C) to proceed and make the elements heavier than helium.

But BBFH could not produce enough helium. The solution, which Hoyle didn’t like at all, was to make the Helium in the Big Bang. Now we think we know that both processes occur: most helium is produced in the Big Bang but carbon and everything heavier is produced in stars. Most lithium and beryllium is produced by cosmic ray collisions breaking up some of the carbon produced in stars.

In a pirouette, Helium abundance is now viewed the observation which makes the Big Bang necessary… Yet, all this rests on an ironclad understanding of stellar physics… which we assume we have, although we don’t.

Astronomers at the gigantic, high altitude Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile investigated intense bouts of star formation in four distant, gas-rich starburst galaxies, where new stars are formed 100 or more times faster than they are in the Milky Way.

By looking at isotopes ratio in Inter Stellar Medium (ISM) Carbon Monoxide CO, one can see if it has been generated in light, or heavy stars. To quote from the original article in Nature: “

“Oxygen, carbon and their stable isotopes are produced solely by nucleosynthesis in stars. The minor isotopes, 13C and 18O, are released mainly by low- and intermediate-mass stars (those with stellar mass less than eight solar masses, M* < 8M⊙) and massive stars (M* > 8M⊙), respectively, owing to their differing energy barriers in nuclear  reactions and evolution of stars. These isotopes then mix with the interstellar medium (ISM) such that the 13C/18O abundance ratio measured in the ISM becomes a ‘fossil’, imprinted by evolutionary history and the stellar initial mass function (IMF). The abundances of the 13CO and C18O isotopologues in the molecular ISM, whose measurements are immune to the pernicious effects of dust, are therefore a very sensitive index of the IMF in galaxies.”

***

Conclusion of the Nature article:

“Classical ideas about the evolutionary tracks of galaxies and our understanding of cosmic star-formation history are challenged. Fundamental parameters governing galaxy formation and evolution—star-formation rates, stellar masses, gas-depletion and dust-formation timescales, dust extinction laws, and more—must be re-addressed, exploiting recent advances in stellar physics.”

This doesn’t prove my ideas about the universe are right. Yet the article mention star formation rates have to be lowered by a factor of… seven. (I will resist multiplying 13.8 billions by 7, which is… not making this up, very close to 98 billions…)

This doesn’t prove my ideas about the universe are right… But it goes my way… Ok, let a professional concludes:

“Our findings lead us to question our understanding of cosmic history,” Rob Ivison, co-author of the study and director for science at European Southern Observatory, said in the statement. “Astronomers building models of the universe must now go back to the drawing board, with yet more sophistication required.“

Moods, in science cannot change until evidence contrary to the old visions one had of things, accumulate. Before that, a change of paradigm can’t be hoped for. Long ago, when I used to be all too human, I communicated with a director at ESO. Delighted by the change of tone, not to say mood… (Another guy I knew was so arrogant that he posited one was not really a scientist until one was the director of a lab, which he happened to be… in astrophysics, the field at hand, where it turns out the big picture was missed…)

But, ladies and gentlemen, remember this: wisdom, even scientific wisdom, doesn’t always triumph in a timely manner. We have examples in science, and mathematics, where wisdom was delayed and defeated for 24 centuries… by the greatest stupidity

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Examples of delayed wisdom: a) The Atomic Theory, of course, complete with eternal motion in the small (which the Greeks had observed and is strikingly described by Lucretius). The theory was then forgotten until the 19C.

b) The Archimedean Axiom in arithmetic/theory of infinity, undetected until 1950, when the US logician/mathematician Robinson detected it.

c) Non-Euclidean geometry found 24 centuries ago, and then lost until 1830 CE…

d) Biological evolution theory, lost between Anaximander and Lamarck… Although practiced by all serious breeders (especially Greek).

e) Computers, lost for 17 centuries… we have one proof the Antikyra mechanism (and various written description) until Blaise Pascal… Hence the computer language “Pascal”

f) Heliocentric theory of Aristarchus of Samos lost between Archimedes and Buridan (and buried again by Catholicism) Heliocentrism was of course obvious, except if one is a caveman, and not to observant…

g) And of course that Earth was round and how big, established and measured first by the great scientist and explorer Pytheas of Massalia (Pytheas de Marseilles), circa 320 BCE. Pytheas even related the tides to the Moon, and got the explanation roughly right (whereas Galileo Galilei, 19 centuries later, got the explanation of the tides completely wrong, and not just that but got a near lethal fight with his friend the Pope, who he brushed off as an ignorant… when the Pope was actually less wrong than Galileo…)

Banque Rothschild Employee Lectures US President

Macron loves to quote classical (French) literature: it makes him look smart, and it’s all he knows. Well, let me help him by giving him more classical literature to quote. Macron addressed Trump, we have the picture. Macron and his colleagues, the “leaders” of the “free” world, are just employed by the big bosses who got them elected, and aspire to be employed even better in the future, by the same culprits, who are beyond any suspicion. However, Trump is a boss they can’t have… because he doesn’t play the game all the other leaders do, and have been created by. Hence a classical drama. Let me reveal what Macron really meant to say:

***

Macron, French president (see photo below):”Hey Donald, what’s the beef about US milk being taxed 270% by Canada? I mean, who cares about milk farmers? In France they wake up at 3am to milk the cows, imagine that! How much more low life can one be? Milk farmers work all day, and they make as much money in a year that I made at Rothschild in 5 minutes.  

Merkel is centre stage, arms planted on a table, with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, standing to her left, arms folded and a look of resignation on his face. {Photo by German Chancellery.]
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, stunning Bolton, irritating Trump, stands next to Merkel, partially obscured. Macron, a natural, self-assured talking head, and he talks in English too, is the one addressing Trump. British prime minister. Theresa May, more obscured still, is at the right of Macron.

I mean, Donald, you want me to milk cows, that’s why you care about milk so much? I couldn’t even buy business suit on that salary! So, Donald, why should I care about milk farmers? I mean, look at you Donald, you have made your billions. Nobody here can trust you: you employ people, you go on TV, you say:’You are fired!’ I mean, what’s that? You relish it! We are just employees, we do what the masters want. But all the masters, Donald, not just you it’s not all about you. Masters don’t like you, Donald, although you are one of them, precisely because you are one of them. You don’t act dignified, Donald, you don’t understand that you and the other masters are wealthy and powerful because the little guys, the milk farmers, and other working stiffs, those losers RESPECT the international order which enables people like us to prosper. As you insult, us the employees, you insult all the powers which made us possible.

We can’t trust you, Donald! You are just one. We need to find other multibillionaire to trust. Many are ten times or much more, wealthier than you. You see, Donald, you are the multibillionaire here. We, the leaders of the free world, we need to find multibillionaire to employ us afterwards, after our public service. Look at kanzler Schroeder, or British PM Major and Blair: they became very wealthy after their public service, that’s only normal, because they serve the powers which make the International Order possible.

 

And we can’t trust you, Donald. And you can’t employ us all, anyway, it would look bad. So we have to get employment elsewhere, with the other guys. And you know what, Donald, they don’t trust you those guys, and they are wise, call them wise guys if you want. Remember president Kennedy, JFK? He called businessmen son of bitches, He said his dad called them that way and now that he was president, he could see how right he was. Remember? The CIA held Cuba, and United Fruit held Cuba. Wise guys, all of them. And that young prick of JFK dropped the CIA and United Fruit. Next thing, JFK was dead, in a hail of bullets for all to see, and nobody admitted to doing it. So, Donald, you want me to be that prick? Do you want me to be wealthy like Blair, or dead like JFK?

 

Yeah, of course, you are as wealthy as Kennedy, you don’t care, you just want to “Make America Great Again”, because you have so much money all you aspire to, is play hero. As Allen Dulles head of the CIA said: “that little Kennedy he thought he was god”. Do you feel like god, Donald? Do you understand Google, Apple, facebook, the NSA are all part of the Deep State? Clinton, Bush and Obama, you predecessors, 24 years of US presidents, saw to it.

 

You think you can go there, and destroy the one percent? Do you realize that 1% of the West, that’s around twenty million people? Do you want to destroy the livelihood of twenty million people Donald? And think of the top .1%, Donald! That’s still two million people who hold all the networks of power, all the media, all the banks. People who can employ us, Donald, when we have finished serving the public. And compensate us as we deserve, for sustaining the established order you are so anxious to destroy.

 

You say it’s different now, Donald But why do you think Google, Apple, Facebook pay no taxes in Ireland and spy on everybody? Because the Deep State wants it, Donald. And who set that up? Not just Obamaba, whatever his name. Oblabla was just an employee, an employee of the wise guys, he, and his team of carefully chosen incompetents who know nothing served them well… Oblabla knew how to calm all the losers and low lives out there, Donald. Instead you are just exciting them, making them believe it’s not all over for them, Donald. It is. The wealthy owns the world, and we serve them.

When I was 24, a wealthy Frenchman who made a fortune in Africa gave me an apartment “corresponding to my function of inspector of finances for all of France”. Then I was employed by Banque Rothschild. Baron Nathan Rothschild put it well: “I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the Empire, …The man that controls Britain’s money supply controls the British Empire. And I control the money supply.”

Those wise guys I was talking about, you know, who made me president, gave me millions, an apartment, etc. they are so mighty they got my main competitor, ex-PM Fillon to fall, because, he had been given a used jacket by a real friend. You get it? A USED jacket? By a friend? Me I got an apartment, a million dollar apartment, Donald, by a plutocrat I didn’t even know well… and no French media talked about it. You know why, Donald? Because my friends, ex and future employers, those other multibillionaires you love to despise, they control all, all the media, all the minds, all the public opinions. So they accused Fillon of corruption, and he was charged, but me, not a shred of suspicion. Like I violated campaign finance laws, because friends gave me free services , like giant arenas, well below market rates. The commission in charge? I nearly doubled the salary of the head of the commission, and, you know what? He said there was nothing there. That’s the Deep State, donald. But remember JFK. So play hero all you want, remember JFK.

Remember what Rothschild said, two centuries ago? Do you control the money supply Donald? No. My friends do, and they will employ me better in the future, me and my colleagues here, if I, and we, keep in place the International Order they own and control.

 

So go on, play hero Donald, you made your fortune, we have to make our own. Meanwhile we will describe you to all the losers and low lives who vote for us, as evil personified and the origin of what we secretly love and sustains us. It is what I call the “esprit de finesse” Donald. Yes, in France the truly wealthy pay no taxes, so is the law, they can own art, castles, factories, all above the law and taxation. Do you think the losers noticed? No. They are scraping by, fighting like pigeons about crumbs. We want to keep it that way. It’s subtle, Donald, subtle, it’s all about make-belief.

You are playing with fire, Donald. The losers and low lives are close to realizing they were completely had. That China was the greatest, latest tool to evade taxation, laws on work, human dignity, and prevent the losers and low lives to hold us hostages, we who have it all, by making useful work.

 

And you know how we do this Donald? With dignity, respect, we instill to the losers and low lives who vote for us and adore us, that the International Global order which transform quickly that assemblage of republics and democracies into a new world aristocracy, has to be respected and is full of dignity. Dignity, Donald, talk about dignity. Act as if it is all very noble, Donald!

Patrice Ayme

 

Trade Is Not Just About Bananas, But Mental Capability

Europe conquered the world, and the world of minds: the United Nations is little more than the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789, writ large. How did Europe do that? By building superior intelligence, superior culture, superior mentality.

All things the Politically Correct Perfect Cretins claim don’t exist. Call them PC square.  

When a country C (for China) invests into another country U, U, for USA), C doesn’t just put money at the disposal of We The People of U.

That is what a ridiculous article in the New York Times, by a five-star economist from the Plutocratic Corruption claims, and exclusively focuses on… forgetting the most important point. (Politically Correct Perfect Cretins Perfect Corruption: PC Cube!)

And the point is military. I will develop it further in a companion essay (of an even more robust nature!)

This Trade Deficit is NOT just about money, far from it! It is about who is smarter in the future, it’s about who is a slave, in the future, it’s about who sells only bananas in the future, it’s about who has a future in the land of the free!

Reminder: battles decide the world. On the battlefield, or in the mental field. And trade is not just about money. The most important trading is about ideas, sentiments, culture, moods, mentalities.

Trade deficits can be good or bad, yes (as standard, Perfectly Corrupt economists, correctly observe). However, not all trades are equal. Selling bananas is not selling cars. A car has much more “added value” than a banana. Some of this “added value” involves knowledge. If one loses the ability of making high-tech products, one loses cognition and know-how. Selling bananas will not compensate for this dearth of mind and intellect brought by an imbalance in added value trade: one will become, irresistibly, the proverbial banana Republic.

For 6,000 years China has been the “Central State” (as China called itself), because of superior Chinese know-how (even in the Nineteenth Century, all what Britain could sell to China in exchange for advanced Chinese products was opium).

A deficit in added-value jobs will lead to a deficit in know-how. Ultimately, this becomes a question of national security deficit. The converse is true. This is why China maintains an enormous trade surplus in added value job products with the rest of the world. China was not born yesterday. The Perfectly Corrupt Political Cretins, though, were, and now relish their slavery at the hands of their masters, who have one foot in China, one foot on their faces, and they don’t get it yet.

The enormous trade imbalance with China enables major companies in the West to escape local Western laws, taxes and regulations by offshoring the work to China. This makes the owners of these companies, which are entangled with ownership of Western media, keen to defend that trade imbalance which makes them ever wealthier, and more influential politically, thus anchoring their domination. This fits China’s strategic purpose just fine.

A civilization which doesn’t maintain mental added value in the trade of ideas is doomed (by internal decomposition or external invasion, or both). So beware the nature of trade!

Patrice Ayme