Don’t Underestimate Earth’s Violence: Permian Mass Extinction Boosted By Ozone Destroying Gases

This is a violent universe. We are a violent species making peace in a violent universe, and it’s not easy. Even those who loudly advocate non-violence often end up feeding even more violence than if they had stayed silent. An example is the US peaceniks in the 1930s, who, anxious to appease the fascists and the gods of war, they claimed, refused entry to millions of refugees… including Anne Frank… Who all died (excuses anybody?) 

As violence is omnipresent and can’t be avoided, the next best thing is to understand it, so one can mitigate it. With floods of mind to spill like lava all over the universe… The first thing to understand is that violence is complicated, finely tuned (as demonstrated by the fact Earth itself goes at 30 kilometers per second along her orbit…)

I have argued that one of the secrets of the success of Earth’s biosphere is its powerful nuclear reactor, churning a giant iron ocean below our feet. It brings up a magnetic shield, and a CO2 burying mechanism, let alone nutrient providing volcanism. biological niches instigator…

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/life-giving-nuclear-earth-reactor/

Heat transfer from the interior of the intelligence giving planet is not smooth: it happens as catastrophic LIPs, Large Igneous Provinces, enormous eruptions which can last several million years, and create continent sized lava flows, miles thick.

It has long been obvious Siberian hyper volcanism caused the worst mass extinction:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/…/21/trapped-by-super-tr…/

The new research finding: a massive release of halogens by the eruption plume, made things worse from disappearance of ozone, thus an extreme UV mutagenicity & sterilization. Same for dinosaurs (I say)!

Even nowadays, 250 million years later the Siberian Traps are immensely impressive: everything in the picture above erupted in a cataclysm.

See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0215-4

“End-Permian extinction amplified by plume-induced release of recycled lithospheric volatiles

Magmatic volatile release to the atmosphere can lead to climatic changes and substantial environmental degradation including the production of acid rain, ocean acidification and ozone depletion, potentially resulting in the collapse of the biosphere. The largest recorded mass extinction in Earth’s history occurred at the end of the Permian, coinciding with the emplacement of the Siberian large igneous province, suggesting that large-scale magmatism is a key driver of global environmental change. However, the source and nature of volatiles in the Siberian large igneous province remain contentious. Here we present halo-gen compositions of sub-continental lithospheric mantle xenoliths emplaced before and after the eruption of the Siberian flood basalts. We show that the Siberian lithosphere is massively enriched in halogens from the infiltration of subducted seawater-derived volatiles and that a considerable amount (up to 70%) of lithospheric halogens are assimilated into the plume and released to the atmosphere during emplacement. Plume–lithosphere interaction is therefore a key process control-ling the volatile content of large igneous provinces and thus the extent of environmental crises, leading to mass extinctions during their emplacement.”

Siberian Traps today. Putorana-Taymir peninsula. Imagine all this as it was 250 million years ago: red-hot lava… Kilometers thick

The demise of the dinosaurs gets more attention. However an even more disastrous event called “the Great Dying” or the “End-Permian Extinction” happened on Earth prior to that. Now scientists discovered how this cataclysm, which took place about 250 million years ago, managed to kill off more than 90 percent of all species of life on the planet. (Yes, it seems those extinction tend to happen every 200 million years, because blobs come up cyclically, as in a well-named “lava lamp”.)

The cause of the extinction was a massive volcanic eruption in what is contemporary Siberia in Russia, known as the “Siberian flood basalts.” What’s remarkable, the eruptions lasted for about one million years. (The eruption which caused the demise of dinosaurs lasted much longer, but peaked around the demise of these type of beasts, and many other types, such as ammonites… See my link above)

The recent study’s lead author Michael Broadley, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Petrographic and Geochemical Research in Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France, observed: “The scale of this extinction was so incredible that scientists have often wondered what made the Siberian Flood Basalts so much more deadly than other similar eruptions”. I had the same objection brought up to me by a top paleontologist. This friend of mine favored the (energetically nonsensical) asteroid collision explanation of the demise of the dinosaurs. It is usually claimed that the LIP of the Cretaceous was not the largest… When, actually, the two places on Earth with giant LIP in full evidence are the Siberian Traps and the Deccan Traps…

Siberian Traps mapped. In violet: lava, In red: tuff (ashes, more or less crystallized together). 2 million square kilometers, roughly Western Europe, in area, and up to 4 million cubic kilometers… That is 4,000 times more voluminous than the largest asteroid imaginable crossing Earth’s orbit. 4,000 times the volume is the problem with asteroid theories of extinctions… Moreover, those 4,000,000 cubic kilometers of lava of the Traps were accompanied of much larger volumes of hot gases…. Same reasoning holds for the “dinosaur” extinction, the KT boundary… 

The Permian extinction affected not only larger animals, decimating about 70 percent of their species, but also killed off 96 percent of the world’s marine life, as well as countless insects. It inflicted such a loss of biodiversity that it took another 10 million years for the ecosystem to bounce back. Interestingly, large species which could burrow survived… and soon their descendants became “mammalian reptiles”… appearing dozens of millions of years before dinosaurs…

The explanation in plain language? The geologists aver that the instigated volcanic eruption was not just massive, but the plume carried massive quantities of halogen gases which destroyed the Earth’s ozone layer at the time. They found this by analyzing the composition of the lithosphere — the hard outer part of the planet, which includes the crust and the upper mantle. Before the Siberian Flood Basalts happened, the Siberian lithosphere featured much chlorine, bromine, and iodine, all chemical elements from the halogen group. Notably, breathing gas containing these elements is highly toxic and will usually result in death. But after the volcanic eruption, these elements seemingly vanished.

“We concluded that the large reservoir of halogens that was stored in the Siberian lithosphere was sent into the earth’s atmosphere during the volcanic explosion, effectively destroying the ozone layer at the time and contributing to the mass extinction,” Broadley elaborated.

Something similar happened with the Cretaceous extinction. As the time before last, animals which could burrow tended to survive… So did those with high metabolism, and the capacity to keep warm, as mammals and birds, or to lay supine and hibernate (crocs, turtles, snakes, etc.) Indeed at the end of the Cretaceous, temperatures collapsed (how the polar dinosaurs, who could survive cold winters, disappeared is probably a tale of its own… not yet told…)

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It’s fashionable to whine we humans are violent beasts. Sure. Yes, indeed. So what? We can leave our dent on this hyper violent universe, precisely because we, too, can be violent. Yes, covering the planet with agriculture is violent (many hate the new Brazilian president, just because he dares to want to do what North Americans and Europeans long did to their own continents; devastate the biosphere to cultivate their gardens).

Yes we kill and eat animals (and may not need to do this much longer). This is how we rose. So here we are, our growing minds having been well fed by enormous quantities of animal vitamins, fat and proteins. And we are starting to understand what more and more all means. To do better than Traps and their LIPs, we need to be more deliberate. That’s called wisdom. We can only brandish our own plumes if we are smart… And the aim of all this human activity, this human violence onto the universe? Not to flood continents with lava, but the universe, with mind.

Patrice Ayme

 

MOODS RULE: Thus California Burns With Fire, Pascal & Other Jihadists, With Hatred

MOODS RULE: Thus HOUSES, BUILT FROM US Comfort-At-Any-Cost MOOD, BURN Enthusiastically In CALIFORNIA, While Blaise PASCAL, BATHING In CATHOLIC SOCIOPATHOLOGY, Was WRONG ON WAR, SPAIN, CATHOLICISM… A FORETASTE OF EVEN GREATER HOLOCAUSTS & WARS TO COME SOON AFTER His Deluge Of Nonsense.

Not lying is not just making correct statements. Saying A = A all day long, while feeling the Earth should be flat, yet knowing that’s probably false, makes one a big time liar, and an hypocrite, while… telling the truth most of the time (as A is indeed equal to A!)

Immediate conclusion: Not lying means, first, having correct moods, moods one really believes in.

(This was a snide remark against most believers, nowadays, who are just liars, as they know enough to feel their own moods lie.)

All the rectangular burned debris above are ex-houses. The “Paradise” (which Trump called “Pleasure”) “Campfire” massacre, which destroyed 12,000 buildings in a few hours, tended to burn buildings more than trees. As is always the case in the USA. Clearly the building of “Paradise” was orchestrated by greedy insanity, not caution, and respect for human life: the city of Paradise had 200 inhabitants (two hundred, yes) in 2010. It had 27,000 inhabitants in 2017. Yes, that’s a rise of nearly 14,000%… in seven years. A city that seems as large as Paris intra muros, built in a few years, with a few roads, within a forest full of towering highly flammable conifers, and even more flammable houses? Is that the logic of pain (pathology), at work?

When a forest burns in France, houses are what’s left, the trees are gone, whereas, in California, the houses are gone, and the trees stand. It’s not a miracle of geography, but a direct consequence of moods. Californians want cheap and roomy houses, now. Californians are told their houses, and cities, are safe, that’s a lie, but a mood has been carefully build to make them all believe, that it is so (by chanting ‘stay safe’ all day long, self-hypnotizing Hare Krishna style, while dodging bullets in houses ready to pancake at the first tremor, if they are not yet gone in smoke).

It’s not just France which has fire resistant cities. Here is Athens, Greece, submitted to proverbial “climate change”:

One of several massive forest fires around Athens, Greece, in recent years. Although houses did burn in fires around Athens, and the death toll was heavy, it would have been way worse, if cities were built US American style…

Building in stone, concrete (France), not thin glued-together-wood (USA), explains the difference. France used to be built in (solid) wood, resulting in great fires.

Thus, laws were passed in France against fire already four centuries ago, outlawing, or discouraging, the use of wood for construction. Stone and mortar were preferred. (that was not new: even before the great fire of Rome, Nero’s administration planned to rebuild Rome to reduce the extreme fire danger blatant to the 7,000 firefighters which the metropolis of 1.2 million possessed). Those anti-fire laws were extended in the 19th Century, disappearing wooden construction from France.

Nantes Cathedral roof burning, 2015. Although built in solid timber, which is very fire resistant (arguably more than steel, which loses half its strength at 500 Celsius… whereas timber stays strong in even higher temps), cathedral roofs occasionally burn (but cathedrals don’t collapse, like melting plastic, NYC World Trade Center style).

Go tell, to many an US American, that the massacre in “Paradise” was caused, mostly, by US ways of building houses, and cities, and you will be perceived to be, or even derided as, an anti-American clown. (Yes, right, it’s quite a shortcut, to be condemned as a bad person, just for seeing bad housing for what it is, but humans love these shortcuts, because they enjoy to hate!)

A mood of North America is that houses should be built in wood, like in Middle Ages’ Europe. Contradict that mood, to enjoy the pleasure of being excoriated. Contradicting moods is not to be taken lightly. Insulting “god” (whatever that is) is a capital crime in many a savage country, to this day.

Houses in Biguglia, Corsica, 2017, next to annihilated forest. French houses are generally the last line of defense against forest fires: Last thing to burn in a French forest fire is the first thing to burn in a US forest fire: houses. Because rebarred concrete doesn’t burn, but glued up together particulate wood debris does! Very well! Gee Even the proverbial Trump dimwit caricature should understand that one! So how come Californians don’t?

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Blaise Pascal Deconstructed: Pascal’s Think-Good By Feel-Good should be viewed as the philosophical garbage it is:

Everybody is against war, even warriors (as serious warriors love to rest, especially after partaking in massacres)… Thus, so is Pascal against war.

Blaise Pascal went over this, the relativity of goodness, laws, justice and opinion, on the legislative side of it, extensively, page after page (Montaigne had preceded him down that path). Good.

However, Pascal wondered why one had to kill so many Spaniards, and why it was a virtue. He nicely forgets that Spain invaded French territory and politics extensively, for generations. And that was not to improve civilization. Just the opposite. Pascal forgot to look at the causality of it all. Evil is not just in the details, it’s inside intricate causal networks of emotional, logical and categorical nature. 

Pascal famously wrote: “Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side.” …. Right. However, I believe truth is not always relative, but sometimes absolute. For example, propagating matter propagates as a wave (De Broglie Matter Waves). An absolute truth. So is the fact Earth turns around the Sun, and not reciprocally.

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/pascal/blaise/p27pe/part5.html

Truth is not just an absolute in the instant. In sociological matters, truth is also a sum over all histories travelled over, to get to the present. (The analogy of sociological truth with Quantum Physics is absolute.)

However, dissected further, the case of Pascal’s view of Seventeenth Century Spain is revealing. Pascal plays Politically Correct, deploring the apparently wanton killing of Spaniards. However, he is lying from deliberate (?) myopia. (Or maybe Pascal was ill-informed: I have better things to do than read all of Pascal’s elucubrations…) Exact nature of that myopia of Pascal? Ignoring the horror of fanatical Catholicism.

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How Pascal was Lying About War With Spain; It was a battle of two moods, tolerance against fascism:

Pascal laments, deplores and condemns what was France’s total, unending war with Spain. Indeed, France was at war with Spain for around two centuries (from the 1400s until final French victory, and then Louis XIV married the Spanish Infante; his grandson would become king of Spain, ridiculous descendants occupy it, to this day…)

But France didn’t start that war, and the war became a dynamic, and a logic of its own, where losing meant losing all. One has to know much history, in full, and at a depth that most of today’s historians still eschew.

The short of it: the Franks, who succeeded the original Romans in control of Gallia and Germania, were fundamentally less fascist, and thus less theofascist, than the Late Roman empire. The religious tolerance they instituted lasted more than five centuries. However, the unending war with Islam, which started disastrously enough with the near instantaneous military invasion of more than half of the Greco-Roman empire, and the three centuries long war with the Saxons, made tempting to harden Christianism into a weapon. That was particularly true in the Iberian peninsula, which suffered Muslim exaction of holocaust proportions, for centuries… before been reconquered, over nearly eight centuries, with methods somewhat similar to those of the Muslims

The end result is that, while Islam was cleansed out of Spain, the Christian war machine naturally turned against its own originators, the French.  The Angevins’ Kingdom of Sicily (regnum Siciliae) was invaded in 1442 by Alfonso V who unified Sicily and Naples as dependencies of Aragon. At his death in 1458, the kingdom was again separated and Naples was inherited by Ferrante, Alfonso’s illegitimate son.

By the time of Pascal, more religiously tolerant France had been at partly religious, partly pure power-play, war with Spain… for around 150 years. The injuries caused to France by Spanish born Catholic fanaticism were incalculable, as they involved, inter alia, the extirpation of the French from southern Italy (which they had freed from the Muslims, in earlier centuries), the extermination of French colonies in the Carolinas and the present US east coast, and no less than seven religious wars inside France during the Sixteenth Century.

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Blaise Pascal: Super Thinker Turned Ultra Catholic Jihadist Full of Hatred?

Pascal was  a great thinker in math (Pascal’s triangle; however not necessarily the first) and physics (he demonstrated atmospheric pressure) and also computer science (he reinvented the Greeks’ work… by then totally lost). He is best known by the rabble for his bet:

The funny thing is that Pascal’s bet is all about the basest instincts: he gained “everything”. What? The proverbial 72 virgins of Islam? Pascal doesn’t realize that the Christian “god” is evil (as the Cathars implicitly said), and that he excludes from consideration decency, the honor of the human spirit, reason, and the order of a better hope. Pascal’s bet pre-supposes that we are as venal as Pascal apparently was…

So Pascal’s indignation at making war to Spain was anti-French. anti-tolerance, and thus, anti-civilizational (France was under the Nantes Edict, instituting co-existence of Catholics and Protestants). But, of course, Pascal was a Catholic fanatic, a child killer “god” worshipper, who wore a cincture of nails which he drove into his flesh when the slightest thought of vanity. assailed him (and that has got to happening all the time, considering he was high society…)  Man is an “incomprehensible monster“, wrote Pascal, “at once sovereign greatness and sovereign misery.” (Notice the obsession with “sovereign”, like the theofascist in chief, the Sun King Louis XIV…)

There are many monster men, because there are many monster moods. Spain became Catholic fanatic, because Catholic fanaticism worked against the monster Muslim invaders, and became highly profitable for those who indulged monstrously (they stole property from Iberian Jews and Muslim)… Enabling them to become ever more monstrous… Until the French army killed the Spanish army at Rocroy… It’s only in the confrontation with France that Spanish Catholic fanaticism became unprofitable.: war with France became very costly, especially as the French and the Dutch, won and won and won… Out of the war with France, came the Netherlands, and out of the latter, an antagonistic, anti-Catholic England (“Glorious Revolution“, 1688-1690 CE).

Fanatic Catholicism was a monster mood, which caused directly the Dark Ages (as distinguished from the Fall of the Roman State, the cause of which run deeper). The Catholic State made the Islamist State look like intellectuals: it destroyed not just incompatible and hostile philosophies, but even science and technology.

In Pascal’s times, destroying fanatical Spanish Catholicism was a civilizational must. Instead, Pascal worried about “libertines”. A few years before Pascal’s death, at age 39, the French army had destroyed the “Spanish Squares”.

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/military-history/spanish-disaster-at-rocroi/

That broke not just Spain as an imperial, theological, fascist power, but defeated Catholic fanaticism, as Pascal feared. And why so much? Because human beings are social, and the social network of Pascal, made of Jansenists he hanged around so much, were, indeed, Catholic fanatics. Pascal talked of god and all that lofty stuff, but, ultimately was just a sick little monkey hanging around his brother and Jansenists…. 

Some will say Pascal was not burning with hatred. But how to else to define the behavior of someone who planted nails into himself, because of desires he had? And, considering the many atrocious religious wars which had wrecked France, fundamentally propelled by Catholic fanaticism paid and organized by Inquisition Spain, to make one’s utmost, as Blaise Pascal did, to further that fanaticism was indeed all about the pleasure hatred provides with.

So off with Pascal’s infamy! Pascal was a Jihadist without a kalashnikov, and that kind is even worse, as it gives the imbeciles their marching, and murdering, and messing-up, orders.

I do this very well, thank you. Actually much better than Pascal ever did: he was always surrounded by a crowd, and thought by the mood of said crowd, including Jansenists. I do mountain alone, on a regular basis, and highly recommend it. Viewed one way, the thought is correct, and addressed to all those who create lots of CO2 to give their money to dictatorships in exotic locales (such as 2018 Thailand)… However correct thinking is established by varying neurological regimes, and moving out of rooms is crucial…

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Pascal’s Sophisticated Hatred Led To Dragonnades:

Dragonnades started in 1681 CE, under Louis the Sun of horror: elite troops, dragons, were billeting to live inside the houses of Protestants. Consider:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/07/04/learn-history-correctly-repeat-after-me-french-sun-king-louis-xiv-was-an-abominable-butcher-catastrophe/

I used big words against Pascal. I trash some of the major thinkers, such as Aristotle (for monarchism and general plutocraticism so extensive it lasts to this day), Montaigne (for inventing the PC myth of the good savage, whereas real savages are killers, such as those North Sentinel Andaman islanders who just gave a fanatical Christian missionary the fate he richly deserved), or generally much of French mid Twentieth Century philosophy for turning wisdom into impotent PC jargon faking opposition to the powers that be, just to implement their intellectual fascism.

So what’s my big problem with Pascal’s extremism? The exact same problem I have with Louis XIV. Louis XIV took part in lots of wars… but not always for bad reasons: France had to recover natural boundaries. However the huge, gigantic and unforgivable crime and error of Louis’ reign was the Revocation of the Nantes Edict of his grandfather, Henri IV (a great king). The Edict, conformed by Louis XIII, enabled Protestants to enjoy equal rights to Catholics. This was not just a question of justice, a question of empowering France -civilization- with her most thoughtful citizens, it was not just a question of a superior economy and a superior  population and superior debate. It was a question of the very essence of France, the enforced tolerance which had enabled Clovis and his successors to unify the heart of Europe, and stop the rot of Christian extremism, which had plunged civilization into the Dark Ages.

In the 1560s, the Protestant population of France was in excess of two million, 12.5% of the population. The Spanish dictatorship then send enormous funds to France, to foment a succession of religious wars against the Protestants (the Spanish financed Ligue Catholique was led by the Duc de Guise, correctly executed later by Henri III).

Instead, Louis XIV threw out of France ten percent of the population, two millions of her most intelligent, most enterprising citizens. Many of their descendants would fight the French state for more than a dozen generations after that, from the 1600s until they drove on tanks into France in 1940. Yes, Louis XIV was a first run at Hitler, no less. He was the foot in the door of mass murder.

Now look at the dates. Pascal dies in 1662; his “Thoughts” are published in 1669. Louis the mass criminal outlaws Protestantism in October 1685, applauded by many of France’s most illustrious writers and pseudo-thinkers: La Fontaine, La Bruyère, Mme de Sévigné., etc. In the entourage of the king, only Vauban, lucidly and courageously, opposes the religious cleansing order. Who is Vauban? The top military underling of Louis. Vauban is the marshall who is ringing France with fortresses (many world heritage sites now). Immediately, 300,000 Protestants are officially counted to be fleeing France (although, that, too, is made unlawful by Louis XIV!)

On January 17, 1686, Louis XIV claimed that his torture of the Protestant population of France, had caused it to be reduced from 800,000-900,000 to 1,000–1,500. So Louis gloated to have thrown out one million (In truth, there were many, many more Protestant than that left: nowadays the Protestants number three millions in France.)

An exiled French Protestant, the engineering professor Denis Papin, invented the first steam engines, and then the first steamboat, propelled by said engine… which was, appropriately enough, destroyed by Catholic monks. One can therefore see that my connections between lofty ideas, intolerance, obscurantism, and the advancement of even the most practical endeavors is rooted in the most basic instincts of power and destruction. Papin is also at the origin of the steam engine in England, where his invention got basically stolen. Had he stayed in France, and be celebrated with millions of Protestants, there is little doubt that France would have led the industrial revolution (instead of rather following England, in spite of the French invention of first cars and first flights). By throwing the Protestants out, a lot of the enterprising, industrial creative bourgeoisie was thrown out…

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/philosophy-feeds-engineering/

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We Need the Goddess Maat, Truth, Our Real, Historical Inspiration, Not the Perverse, Child Killing Abrahamic “god”, who deconstructed civilization into deliberate obscurantism, and the most cruel passions. (Those who sneer, don’t know much about Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, Sumer, Minoan and Athenian Greece: all these were part of the same civilization, or renewal thereof; much of “Greek” creativity is actually… Pharaonic Egypt creativity; the latter is still, in some ways, especially relating to gender, ahead of today’s version of civilization, meaning one can go backwards…)

Please consider:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/commonly-accepted-delusions-follies-that-bind/

Moods rule. Moods sustain, and are sustained, by sociologies. And pathological moods are sustained by pathological sociologies. An excellent example is Islam, which ruined what was the wealthiest part of the Greco-Roman empire, inter alia. That ideological disaster has been self-sustained, because the concept of “holy war”, although pathological to most, is most profitable to the most pathological warrior societies, justifying and sustaining them.

Thus the pathological nature, the logic of pain, of Islam made it  popular with war minded groups, such as the followers of Muhammad (in contradistinction with the rest of Mecca), or the Turks, or the three western Mongol Khanates… China, though, never converted to Islam, as no group of pure warriors could ever hope to take control of this vast, oldest, most sophisticated civilization:

Pathology on one side of the Karakorum, reason beyond it…

Pascal hid his fanaticism, ultra Catholic communitarianism and sadomasochism below Political Correctness. But hiding is lying… When contemplating Pascal’s weak thoughts, we can see once again that being guided by the fundamental Egyptian goddess Maat is better than be guided by the mad Abrahamic, cruel and jealous god. Maat was the goddess of reality. She personified truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice, regulating also the seasons, stars, universe and other deities.

The master thinkers who misled us, have always insisted that we have a Judeo-Christian civilization, a way to define a ship according to the captain who wrecked it. In truth, we have more of an Egyptian civilization, than anything else. Time for us to free ourselves from the error of believing otherwise.

People calling for Aasian Bibi’s murder should be arrested and condemned to serious imprisonment among similarly minded fanatics… to prevent propagation of their Islamizing fanatical, murderous mood… In other words, concentration camps, after application of fully enlightened justice, is not always a bad idea.

And the time is now: the growth of Islam is apparently the latest trick to control and divide intellectual opposition to plutocracy, and a mad world leadership. The exact same trick was used in the Fourth Century, when Islamism’s more sophisticated parent, Christianism, was imposed by the emperors onto the intellectual class of the Greco-Roman empire. The same situation lead to the same moods, in unjust oligarchies, or We The People submitted to them.

An example is the case of Aasian Bibi, a Pakistani Christian condemned to death, for… insolence! Christianism arrived in present day Pakistan area, more than three centuries before the invention of Islam by desert raiders keen to raid, steal, murder and submit in the name of “god” (as Abraham’s god is mad, cruel, jealous , and prone to mass murder just because He can, the fit between the desert raiders and the Jewish “god” was perfect, the Prophet explained to his would-be followers). However severe the crimes of Christianism, basic Christian texts (in contradistinction with basic Islamist texts) are less strident about killing the “insolent”.

And the point is that, the only mood compatible with optimal survival now, is the world’s democratic republic of human rights. And the most fundamental of these rights, is the right to free thinking! All other fundamental rights, including life (but not pursuing happiness!) result from it… Yet, it’s not that simple: to free thinking, one has to free the moods, first. 

Rousseau pretended that civilization put men in chains, but it is actually system of thought put in place by military authorities which do this: Christianism is the best example. Christianism was put in place first by solo Roman super emperor and bloody tyrant Constantine, and his several nearly as bloody successors:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/emperor-constantine-christian-terrorist-325-ce-fall-of-rome-part-x/

Islamism was an even more spectacular imitation, put in place by a raider-in-chief.

As they rule emotions, that is the neurohormonal system, moods are nearly impossible to extirpate: one needs to fight them physically (as many an eradicating invasion testify), or emotionally. Appealing to formal logic is not enough.

There are hierarchies of moods. What brings together Californian fire architecture and Pascal’s consumption of the world by Catholicism is a most basic mood: the burning desire to oversimplify, and seek comfort, intellectual or physical, fast and cheap. In other words, 21st Century Californians living in matchstick houses and religious fanatics (such as Pascal) revere a mood oversimplifying the human experience by mitigating pain and maximizing comfort, to the point of denying truth… which is exactly what they were looking for.

Egypt ceases to be great and at the forefront, when it denied Maat, truth. That happened under Pharaoh Akhenaten and the redoubtable Nefertiti, his spouse, instigator, and sometimes sole ruler. Their fascist monotheism was soon reverted… but too late; the mood had changed. Egypt had lost Maat, Truth, and never fully recovered (in spite of a last sparkling under the Ramesses; some may argue the Peoples of the Seas invasions could be more to blame… but no, as Egypt fought those back successfully…)

Want to improve minds? Improve moods! And start with truth!

Patrice Ayme

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Notes: 1) Pascal’s real quote about the room is different from the one I picked up on the Internet above; Pascal really said: “Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre”. (All misfortune of men comes from only one thing, which is not knowing how to stay at rest in a room.)

2) Pascal’s autopsy revealed damage to several organs, including his brain. So one shouldn’t be too mean to him, and reserve all the meanness to those who still admire his extremism to this day.

3) The preceding was written during Thanksgiving 2018, from the Alps.Thanksgiving entangles several interesting moods. Thanksgiving is a celebration of people good and dumb enough, to feed their previously starving, future exploiters and assassins… A depiction of what was long viewed as the correct mood in the USA: give and they shall take! Everything. And that’s not just good, but worthy of many thanks… As Native Americans did to their fallen prey, after killing the nourishing deer…

Those Flying Boats Fight The CO2 Catastrophe

California, while burning, in a never seen before way, builds (some) electric cars and installs a significant solar electric production capability. However, there are other ways to advance the struggle for more ecological tech. Competing sailboats is one way.

A competition of sailboats is organized from Saint Malo, France, to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, every four years. It’s open to all transoceanic sailboat categories, “ultimes”, multi-hulls, monohulls IMOCA, etc… as long as there is only one person on board. Prizes are attributed in each classification category.

Up to four years ago, the fastest boats were giant trimarans. Now, no more. A new, even faster category, has blossomed: enormous flying maxi-trimarans, known as “Ultimes”. Other boats also fly onto of foils, including monohulls…

Banque Populaire Flying Giant Trimaran flying at the start of Route du Rhum… Against the wind… Notice it leaves little wake, relative to the motor boats escorting it. The same boat left floater, high up in the air in this picture, would tear apart in a storm at 70 km/h, a few thousand kilometers later…

An object in a liquid is slowed down by friction, all along the hull. If one can reduce the surface of the object rubbing against the liquid, one can go faster. Thus the Ultimes rise above water on wings (which fly inside the water). 16 tons of boat rest on just a total of 4 square meters of foils. (Wings can be much smaller in water, and enable to fly at much lower speeds, as water is 1,000 times denser than air…)

So what? What’s the wisdom to be extracted from all this tech avalanche?

Well, we, humanity, are a tech avalanche. No tech, no wisdom. Or then just that of an orangutan.

Ah, yes, we are killing the planet.

It’s going to get way worse, in the next decades, as the man-made CO2 climate catastrophe enfolds. Predictable and predicted! Picture by author, last January, Tahoe:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/01/10/climate-catastrophe-california-forests-dying-giant-fires-coming-in-2018/

Maritime transport is one of the main sources of CO2 pollution.

The technology developed by these (mostly) French boats could be applied to cargo boats 10,000 times heavier.

Same flying boat in action, foils in evidence.

Nothing to smirk at: the sailboats can fly at 80 kilometers an hour (50 mph), using just the wind. Not just pushed by the wind, but even zigzagging into the wind.

It’s not without risks: the “ultime” Banque Populaire IX (pictured) lost its left floater, while in a storm, in the middle of the Atlantic, and immediately capsized. Shortly before that, it was flying with minimal sails at 70 kilometer and hour, in five meters seas. (A fisher boat recovered the captain, an expert capsizer, and brought him to Portugal, two days of motorboat away.)

At least two other flying boats capsized because of storms in the same race, one, skippered by a British sailor hit rocks off Guadeloupe shortly before the end. Alex Thomson, who placed second and third prior in the Vendee-Globe, solo around the world race, had forgotten to charge his shockwatch. So he overslept in his 20 minutes sleep, and got woken up when his boat hits the rocks. Thomson was leading in the monohull category, and was in fourth place overall behind two ultimes and one multihull. The international jury gave him a 24 hour penalty for using his motor to extract himself from the reefs…) Another boat captained by the Normande Claire Pruvot was hit by a cargo ship which recovered her 45 minutes later…

Overall, the death rate of these sailing adventures is now very low. Capsizing has become a well mastered art, with insubmersible boats, and immediate alerts. It was not always this way: the famed solo sailor Alain Colas disappeared on the same Route du Rhum, 40 years ago, while leading it. His boat, then the world’s most advanced multihull, could sink, it was made of metaL, and sink it did. Colas’ last message, in a terrible storm, was that he was surrounded by mountains of water.

The reason sailboat tech has not been applied much in large transport has been mostly political, as usual. Maritime transport was long excluded from pollution rules, thus used the very worst oil residue refineries produced… this is the highly polluting “bunker” fuel. Rotating sails can be used (they exploit the fact that if wind slips faster on one side of an object, a low pressure occurs, just as where the wind slows down, so molecules pack up, and higher pressure happens. This is why rotating balls have curving trajectories.) Rotating sails enable at least 10% savings.

Investing massively in wind tech for major boats has an element of risk, so government should help. Northern Europe has mandated stricter pollution rules.

Recently a giant cruise ship, the largest in the world, made in France, berthed in Marseilles, France. It was computed that it polluted as much as two million cars, that is of the order of the entire Provence region of France.

Air transport will also have to be improved, with electricity (hybrid planes, recharging while descending, etc.) Yes, that depends upon batteries. But, as with antibiotics, much more public research investment have to be done. One can’t just let private companies do it all. The rumor has it that Samsung has improved battery tech considerably with graphene (charging in minutes, and with 40% more energy storage). Right, graphene was discovered thanks to government research funding. But more public funding is needed.

A 62 year old Frenchman, Francis Joyon, won the Route du Rhum this year. A few miles from the end, his boat was just a few boat lengths away from Gabart, a young sailing and engineering genius who had been 200 nautical miles ahead earlier on. But Gabart’s most modern boat was “broken”, with a missing foil on the right, and a missing safran on the left. The competition was nearly delayed, because the storms piling up in the Atlantic were so numerous and so nasty (still another consequence of the climate catastrophe).

Francis Joyon of France set a new record time for the 3,542-nautical mile Route du Rhum-Destination Guadeloupe solo transatlantic race from Saint Malo in Brittany to Pointe-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe. At the helm of the maxi-trimaran IDEC Sport, Joyon completed the solo race in seven days, 14 hours and 21 minutes, beating the existing course record by just 46 minutes and 45 seconds (Gabart and Joyon mostly slowed down by storms; the other four ultimes were damaged, or capsized, although two restarted after repairs over a few days in Spain).

That Frenchman Joyon holds the around-the-world world record in a sailboat; less than 41 days (with a team)… It was his seventh participation in that competition, and his first win… Gabart, and many others, wants foils to be controlled automatically in real time: it will allow the boats to fly more safely and better. Right now regulations forbid automatic wing adjustments (although they are central to modern aviation… The reason is that it will cost money to have adaptive foils, and that will advantage the wealthiest, and that’s seen as unfair by the competition authorities at this point. Joyon won with an older “Ultime“; the three most recent “ultimes” broke, although Gabart was able to cross the Atlantic with his “broken boat”…)   

Gabart’s MACIF boat flying. Gabart placed second with MACIF, seven minutes behind Joyon. MACIF had lost its left wing… Those boats can sustain 70 km/h in 5 meters seas…

High tech moguls from Silicon Valley informed me years ago (before Elon Musk), that only software was really high-tech (Musk is changing that perfectly dumb perspective). The rest of tech was obsolete, they reckoned. Material high-tech was not high-tech, according to those mentally deficient characters obsessed by software. But software without hardware can’t exist, and they progress together. Flying sailboats use ever more electronics, and will probably soon use active flying surface, quite a bit similar to those the BFR, the Big Falcon Rocket of Elon Musk’s SpaceX plans to use when re-entering the atmosphere at 11 kilometers per second…

Patrice Ayme

 

 

Accept Reality, Accept Wisdom, Truth Is Its Prophet: On Those Who Deny Columbus

History is an ocean of blood over which human hope has sailed. Removing all statues of historical figures will enable to forget that. So we are in a better position to ignore all of history. Thus, we can hope to rediscover experimentally mass slavery, systematic torture to death, mass cannibalism, as most American societies had prior to Columbus… since we can’t understand it theoretically! On our own. For our future. Claiming we are not what our ancestors were, and we still are. From Politically Correct to Political Con. Columbus left 39 men behind, on his first trip. They were certainly all killed, and probably eaten.

Los Angeles took down a statue of Columbus, as if he were Karl Marx (and his evil logic). True, the consequences of Columbus’ work is mixed. But Columbus’ basic logic, a route toward the Indies, to get to spices, while avoiding those imperialist Portuguese, was not evil…. It was just trade. Whereas lots of other logics venerated today, from Christianism to its pet, Islamism, are deeply evil.

Refusing history is refusing wisdom.

What Los Angeles should have done, was to explain what happened with Columbus. And to explain that it is US ideology, not Columbus ideology, which led to the holocaust of California “Indian” Natives… After 1848!

Accusing the Spaniards, or the Mexicans, to have massacred California Natives, as the Los Angeles supervisors implicitly did, by accusing Columbus, is the same old, white Anglo-Saxon supremacist holocaustic racism.

Los Angeles is ridiculous. Not just ridiculous, criminal.

Why criminal? Let me deploy my logic a little bit more. Because the Spaniards, and the Mexicans who followed them, those living consequences of Columbus, didn’t massacre the California Natives. Spanish ideology didn’t kill the Californians. Los Angeles supervisors claim it did. They are liars, or then criminally ignorant. The US logic, inherited the West Country men’s ideology… Of Elizabethan Age ideology…. As I pointed out in “Shakespeare Against Sade“, not all logics are the same, not all ideologies are the same, not all systems of mind are the same, they are more or less evil.

Oh, by the way, “Los Angeles” is Spanish, language of the invaders. To speak Spanish is to collaborate with the invasion, celebrating it. I propose to change to a Native Americans’ name. Ah, correct, I forgot, how silly of me, Native Americans were also invaders, colonizers, discoverers of America, so the Native Americans’ version of the Los Angeles name, should be replaced by growls and grunts of the wild beasts who preceded them…  

It’s not just the PC Americans who are grotesquely hypocritical collaborators of the West Country Men criminally invasive mentality. The European Court of Human Rights decided that to call Muhammad a PEDOPHILE, because he married a six  (6) year old, and had sex with her when she was nine (9) was a crime. So for the European Court of Human Rights, reality doesn’t apply to Muslims.

Refusing reality is refusing wisdom.

Refusing wisdom means total war, in the end. Because the present economy is completely unsustainable, with present technology. Only examining reality further will make life worth living, looking forward.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

More details:

A statue of explorer Christopher Columbus that has stood for 45 years in downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Park was removed Saturday.

“The statue of Christopher Columbus rewrites a stained chapter of history that romanticizes expansions of European empires and exploitations of natural resources and of human beings,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis, who authored the motion to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

“We have all inherited this complex, difficult history.

Minimizing — or worse, ignoring — the pain of Los Angeles’ original inhabitants is a disservice to the truth. The removal of the Columbus statue in Grand Park is an act of restorative justice that honors and embraces the resilient spirit of our County’s original inhabitants. With its removal, we begin a new chapter of our history where we learn from past mistakes so we are no longer doomed to repeat them.”

Los Angeles’ area was discovered by Europeans around 1602 CE, generations after Columbus’ death, and then not visited by Europeans for another 166 years. Later, 11 Spanish-speaking families established themselves there. Among 5,000 Natives in the basin. By the time of the arrival of the Spanish in the 18th century A.D., there were 250,000 to 300,000 native people in California and 5,000 in the Los Angeles basin. Since contact with Europeans, the people in what became Los Angeles were known as Gabrielinos and Fernandeños, after the missions associated with them. Native Americans in North America were not massacred by followers of Columbus, but of the mood of the West Country Men

The removal event featured a news conference and a Native American ceremonial dance.

“This is a natural next step in the progression to eliminate the false narrative that Christopher Columbus discovered America,” Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell said earlier in the week. Maybe it will help: after all, the Vikings went all over north-east America. They couldn’t settle, because the Natives tried to exterminate them. By exterminating the Vikings, the Natives sealed their fate: interbreeding with the Viking would have made native Americans immunologically stronger.

“Columbus himself was personally responsible for committing atrocities and his actions set in motion the greatest genocide in recorded history. His image should not be celebrated anywhere.”

Well, certainly others than Columbus can be celebrated, such as Hypatia massacred by Saint Cyril. Saint Cyril is still a saint, that’s a much bigger problem than Columbus… Because Saint Cyril wanted to massacre non-Christians. Columbus didn’t particularly want to massacre Native Americans. Yes, in the end, there was a genocide. However a genocide, like all and any evil has a logic, and it is this logic that is evil. Columbus’ logic was not evil. Saint Cyril’s logic was evil. Celebrating Saint Cyril is celebrating his evil logic.  

PA

 

NEW IDEAS: NOT FROM CROWD HOWLING TOGETHER. CREATIVITY: WAR AGAINST CROWDS, Yesterday’s Culture…

DARK IMPULSES ENABLE INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY, HENCE CURIOSITY, COLONIZATION, THUS HOMO. AS LOVE IS A GIVEN, THIS HYPER AGGRESSIVITY, AT THE ROOT OF HOMO, CAUSES AN AMBIVALENCE…

Evolution is not Politically Correct. Evolution just is. But evolution is our creator. Some have said: we are not evolution. Yes we are not just evolution, we are also the culture ourselves and our predecessors, evolved. But still, we have to understand this evolutive part we are entangled with… and which gave birth to our cultural capability, if not directly, our culture.  

New Ideas, wisdom, or even the love of wisdom, never come from a crowd howling together. However, we now live in times of crowds howling together on social networks, sharing silliness, superficial love and “likes”. But, even more enthusiastically, those crowds share hatred towards those they don’t want to understand, so that they can hate some more. Genuine creators have to make war to those brutish crowds, otherwise they won’t be able to create anew, that is above and superior.

Can’t escape War: war is tied in to the essence of the human project, curiosity.War is tied in to the essence of the human project, curiosity: that’s not really a problem, it’s tied in with Homo (or then Homo itself is viewed as a problem, and that’s nihilism). However, it’s a problem if, as “humanism” so far did, it’s ignored. Christianism viewed evil of curiosity, the original sin, tellingly contradicting Zoroastrianism.

***

Stupid people howling with relish didn’t start yesterday: just look at the way Christianism took over the Greco-Roman empire, one burned library at a time. More recent examples: generations ago, philosophy was heavily contaminated by so-called brainless structuralism, or “French Theory”, a medieval harking back to the times of no-thinking (which lasted more than a millennium before that, thanks to Bible). Before structuralism it was Marxism, Stalinism, Nazism, Fascism which destroyed debate, and replaced it by lethal mob rule. Now, things are getting worse: increasing plutocratization depends upon stupidification (and thus the push towards controlled social networks, Communitarianism, Islamization, etc.). Wisdom, and its love, are on the wane.

Communitarianism is an enemy of wisdom and mental creativity. It categories people, and make these categories what’s most primordial about people. Instead of categorizing people, one should categorize ideas. If an idea is good, wherever it comes from, it’s a good idea. Roughly all thinkers have had some good ideas at some point, even Hitler or Saint Augustine! Thinking is about ideas, not howling together.

John Michael Gartland commented: “Thank You. One of the most astute observations I have seen in a long time. The insane fanaticism of the tribal political party narrative with no deviation from the party scriptures permitted no matter how fantastically fictional and politically convenient, steeped in the fantasy of something masquerading as the common good and self-righteousness has become a worldwide contagion.”

***

A dirty little secret of humanity is that, absent friendship, one can always befriend hatred itself. As social networks, paradoxically, have increased loneliness, they incite more individuals to partake in hatred and pack attacks. Hence the increasing venom in said social media!

***

In the Spanish Civil War, Republican forces arguably had more losses fighting each other than the devastation that they suffered from the Nazi and Italian fascist armies and Franco’s rebel army. The entire take-over of Spain by mass murdering lethal, church allied fascism, was financed by US plutocrats and corporations (many car companies and oil companies such as Texaco, which provided the Nazi air force in Spain all the fuel it needed to transport Franco’s army…

By allying itself with Islamists now, the left is making the error it did then, allying itself with Stalinists! Stalin and his goons ordered the killing of all the left. At the time, Stalin was secretly in a crucial military alliance… with the Nazis, on Russian soil.

Actually, the present alliance with Islamists is even worse than the alliance with Stalinists: the Soviets could claim to foster a new system of thought. A new man, let alone a new woman. Attacking the USSR in 1941, Italian tankers were amazed to find female Soviet tank officers, killed in action.

Instead, Islam was a new ideology… In 632 CE, in savage and primitive Meccan Arabia, which had been kept away from the major civilizing influences from all around (to the north, Rome, north-west, Egypt, north-east, Persia, west in Ethiopia, south in Yemen, and east in India). The Muslim prophet, speaking in the name of the great vegetable in the sky, ordered men to change in such a way it led to a demographic explosion, most militarily profitable (for example it was suggested not to kill girls, and have sex with slave girls…)

The success of Islam long baffled top Christians, such as this Byzantine emperor who debated an old Muslim scholar. In 1391 CE Manuel II Palaiologos debated a Persian scholar and recorded the exchanges in a book he authored (See dialogue 7 of “Twenty-six Dialogues with a Persian”) in which the Roman Emperor stated: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” Right, the whole point!

Many Muslims were offended by this characterisation of Muhammad, and protested against it. For others it may simply have been false indignation or the assumption that non-Muslims had been offended by it, and they had to look outraged, to keep the reputation of Islam as peace.

In his book, Manuel II, apparently a personal acquaintance of “god”, continues: “God is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death…”

Well, we know better. Our creator is biological evolution and our creator used war to conquer the world, and shape up our genetic and epigenetic. War made us, not just love. Islam understood that perfectly well, hence its success.

War, hatred and extermination have propelled humanity through evolutionary gauntlets (leaving lots of genocides behind). Evolution intelligently selected those strategies, from the first ape who braved the savanna, and forged human neurology with them. Ignoring them is ignoring not just wisdom, but incoming fate!

Humanity is more complex, and more perverse, than humanitarianism has imagined so far. Ignoring that complexity ignores the opportunity new technology (“social networks”) offers for old fashion hatred. There is an architecture an evil, and humanity was built with it.

To demonstrate here the aggressivity of advancing wisdom, let’s victimize Albert Einstein a bit. Einstein famously said:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” (One could call this definition, “Einstein Insanity”). Guess what? Nonlocality predicts that, indeed, doing the same thing all over again, will lead to different results. And that’s how the universe work, experiences & logic show. So Einstein was as wrong as wrong can be. He missed the point entirely, by assuming the veracity of its opposite, which is false. And Einstein was clever enough to realize that what he called “spooky action at a distance”… could be true, by just evoking its possible existence.

Tying evil, strife and mental creativity exaggerated? No. Unavoidable. Morality and the principle of precaution have to admit it.

So I was just nasty to Einstein, in a sense (after all, I’m saying I see something that could be seen in Einstein’s day and age… And Bohr saw some of it…). I can do better: I can spite all mathematicians between Euclid and Bolyai. Gauss made a point to spite Bolyai, daring to say that recognizing and flattering Bolyai’s work would be to flatter himself… as he had, he claimed, secretly got the same results (but didn’t reveal them as he “feared the cries of Boeotians”, a classic allusion to Athens northern neighbors… whom Athenians thought honorable to view as stupid). Here is Gauss, in full nastiness mode: “To praise it would amount to praising myself. For the entire content of the work…coincides almost exactly with my own meditations which have occupied my mind for the past thirty or thirty-five years.” In 1848 CE Bolyai discovered that Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky had published a similar piece of work in 1829 (but only on hyperbolic geometry). Discouraged by Gauss, Bolyai published only 24 pages, ever, out of the 20,000 pages of math he wrote…

In reality, after Euclid, mathematicians forgot that there was a wheel, a sphere, or even a cushion: Aristotle’s works contain SIX (6) theorems of non-Euclidean geometry (one hyperbolic, the rest elliptic). For all to see! Thereafter, in spite of these demonstrated theorems, an idiotic debate on the parallel axiom unfolded, for 21 centuries . Even worse, Non-Euclidean geometry had been used to measure Earth with great precision, around 300 BCE, in Marseilles, by Pytheas!

In the same vein, I have dared to stand all of mathematics on its head, and shake, by pointing out the infinity axiom makes no sense.

Any debate, in a sense, is a fight. Refusing all and any fighting, is refusing all and any debate. Hence, refusing us, the essence of what made us. It shouldn’t be a debate…

Patrice Ayme

We Are Quantum Machines, Thus Smart In Nonlocal Ways

Biological organisms are Quantum machines. That makes them completely different from 100% determined automata. There is nothing automatic about a Quantum machine. Moreover, the Quantum is intrinsically nonlocal: that makes it intelligent. And thus so it is for evolution itself! Yes, evolution is intelligent: Quantum physics made that possible.

New (Applied Quantum) Physics needs to be developed to figure out biology.

In the chlorophyll molecule, photons are absorbed and transformed into energy to transport electrons with nearly 100% efficiency: nearly every photon is absorbed. This is an  indication of Quantum in action.

Now what is a Quantum machine? Not so simple, it can work in such mysterious ways, that physicists themselves are baffled:

https://physicsworld.com/a/is-photosynthesis-quantum-ish/

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/ultrabiology/

Patrice Ayme

Pétain, Racism, Treason, Racist World Wars, USA, Macron: the Eternal Wheel of Hateful Infamy, & Smugly Ignorant Complicity

The young, yet arrogant merger and acquisition banker turned French president, Emmanuel Macron, decided to honor Marshall Petain. Parroting Chirac, Macron said Petain was a hero who made “funestes” (lethal) choices (funeste comes from the Latin “funus”, namely a burial…)

Macron’s infamy encountered an outcry, in particular from Jewish organizations.

Indeed Petain’s criminal organization (“government”) passed a number of racial laws in particular against the Jews.

Petain had succeeded to hold the German fascist invaders at Verdun in 1916. (France had plenty of other generals who could have done the same.)  

The Battle of Verdun fought from 21 February to 18 December 1916, was the largest and longest battle of the First World War on the Western Front between the German and French armies. The battle took place on the hills north of Verdun-sur-Meuse in north-eastern France. The German 5th Army attacked the defences of the Fortified Region of Verdun (RFV, Région Fortifiée de Verdun) and those of the French Second Army on the right bank of the Meuse. Inspired by the experience of the Second Battle of Champagne in 1915, the Germans planned to capture the Meuse Heights, an excellent defensive position with good observation for artillery fire on Verdun. The Germans hoped that the French would commit reserves to recapture the position and suffer catastrophic losses in a battle of annihilation, at little cost to the Germans in advantageous positions on the heights.

The Germans captured Fort Douaumont in the first three days of the offensive. The German advance slowed in the next few days. By 6 March, ​21 French divisions were in the RFV and a more extensive defence in-depth had been constructed. Pétain ordered that no withdrawals were to be made and that counter-attacks were to be conducted, despite exposing French infantry to fire from the German artillery. By 29 March, French artillery on the west bank had begun a constant bombardment of German positions on the east bank, which caused many German infantry casualties.

In August and December, French counter-offensives recaptured much of the ground lost on the east bank and recovered Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux. The battle had lasted for 303 days, the longest and one of the most costly in human history. In 2000, Hannes Heer and K. Naumann calculated 377,231 French and 337,000 German casualties, a total of 714,231, an average of 70,000 a month. In 2014, William Philpott wrote of 976,000 casualties in 1916 and 1,250,000 suffered around the city during the war.

World War One had been launched deliberately by the German imperial fascists in early August 1914. Their aim had been to destroy France first, then Russia, and finally, after it got an army together, force Great Britain to surrender. However after smashing into Belgium, and crushing northern France, the racist fascist invaders suffered a brilliant counterattack at the First Battle of the Marnes between 6 September and 13 September 1914.

Fascist German Troops Fighting the French REPUBLIC At Verdun, France, 1916. Ultimately more than 1.2 million casualties at Verdun alone, in a radius of a few kilometers.

French Commander In Chief Joffre was able to bring General Michel-Joseph Maunoury’s newly-formed Sixth Army into line northeast of Paris and to the west of the BEF. Using these two forces, he planned to attack on September 6. On September 5, Kluck learned of the approaching enemy and began to wheel his First Army west to meet the threat posed by the French Sixth Army. In the resulting Battle of the Ourcq, Kluck’s men were able to put the French on the defensive. While the fighting prevented the Sixth Army from attacking the next day, it did open a 50 kilometer (30-mile) gap between the First and Second German Armies.

Utilizing the new technology of aviation, French reconnaissance planes quickly spotted this gap and reported it to Joffre. Moving to exploit the opportunity, Joffre ordered General Franchet d’Espérey’s French Fifth Army and the BEF into the gap. As these forces moved to isolate the German First Army, Kluck continued his attacks against Maunoury. Composed largely of reserve divisions, the Sixth Army came close to breaking but was reinforced by troops brought from Paris by taxicab, buses and other motorized vehicles on September 7. On September 8, the aggressive d’Espérey launched a large-scale attack on Bülow’s Second Army driving it back.

By the next day, both the German First and Second Armies were being threatened with encirclement and destruction. Told of the threat, Moltke suffered a nervous breakdown. (The breakdown lasted months and was kept secret; Moltke had been the main fascist behind the foolhardy German attack onto the world and civilization.) 

During that week on the Marnes, 80,000 French troops died, and so did 68,000 Germans. (1,700 British, fighting under French command, also died.; the BEF, equivalent to a French army corps was not aggressive, because of its commander, also named… French. That enabled the german invaders to escape…)

The German retreat at the Marnes marked the abandonment of the Schlieffen Plan, that sneak attack on civilization. Overall German commander, and war plotter Moltke is said to have reported to the Kaiser: “Your Majesty, we have lost the war.” In the aftermath of the battle, both sides dug in and four years of stalemate ensued.

I went into some length about the First Battle of the Marnes to explain that, relative to these great feats, by great generals, in a war of movement, Pétain’s work pales into obscurity: his main battle, Verdun, was one of fortresses. One kilometer here, one kilometer there… But there is worse.

***

So yes, Pétain was a hero at Verdun. But he was put there, under orders from higher-ups in the French hierarchy. Pétain was following orders. He organized supply lines (Voie Sacree), got French soldiers executed.

When I heard of Macron’s temporary collapse of reason, I sent a message to a number of organizations.

Marshall Pétain obeyed at Verdun. However, when dictator of France, he chose to set up racist anti-Jewish laws. A crime against humanity. Pétain also agreed to a pro-Nazi ceasefire in June 1940, instead of pursuing the war from Algeria (Nazis couldn’t seize that). So he is a Nazi traitor to France & civilization, worthy of death!

Pétain was indeed condemned to death in 1946, and struck with national indignity.

Let me repeat my points:

1. When Pétain was a hero, he was actually not just executing soldiers, but executing orders. Executing soldiers? The orders not to retreat were given using the old Roman method of executing those who disobeyed.
2. When Pétain was on his own, in June 1940, he betrayed, first the Republic (France was a Republic fighting a lethally racist invading tyranny, the natural scion of the despicable tyranny of 1914… Not to speak of the holocaust in Namibia earlier…). Then Pétain betrayed civilization with his racial laws.  
   

In 1940, France had been the victim of her own commander-in-chief, who didn’t see the trap Hitler and the German High Command had led him in (although his second in command told him it was a possibility). A number of incredible coincidences made the situation worse (for example the absence of the Second Armored British division, which was supposed to be where the Nazi tanks passed). In 40 days the Battle of France (as it came to be known) caused 360,000 dead or wounded French soldiers, and around 164,000 casualties on the Nazi and Italian side (a bit more than 6,000 Italian died, and more than 50,000 Nazis).

Considering perhaps the callous disregard the USA showed for the peril in which France and britain, its parents, were. Pétain called for a ceasefire.

Asking for a ceasefire with the Nazis in 1940 was a mistake: it made the French empire weak, when it was far from defeated. The French fleet and French aviation were ultramodern, mostly intact and in great numbers. Retreating to North Africa, they could have prevented indefinitely the Nazis to get to Africa (the British, with much smaller forces than the French had, all by themselves, succeeded to nearly do so).   

Paradoxically, by holding Africa (and the Middle East), the French Republic would have been in better situation to protect French citizens in occupied France.

But then, of course, the population of France in 1939 was less than in 1914. Thanks to the butchery of WWI. Many French didn’t feel like dying for another war whose great and only victor was going to be the USA again… French die, US profits. (And you tell me Trump is bad? Relative to what?)

So why didn’t Pétain choose that route? Because he was a racist (against Jews, at the very least). A closet Nazi. It’s also for the same reason that De Gaulle, also a racist (this one against North Africans), was so fond of Pétain’s memory.

Actually, Pétain was filth. He should be celebrated as such. And only as such. His glory in WWI is nothing: it was ordered to him. Pétain clearly deserved death much more than King Louis XVI. Ah, but then, Macron said France couldn’t get over the execution of the king (although Britain clearly had). And that France still longed for a king… So, if Louis XVI was not that culprit, then neither was Pétain…

US citizens, reading all this, could smirk: who cares? Well, the French Republic, and her multiethnic empire twice saved the world by fighting to death German lethally racist fascism in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. Pétain was Hitler’s soulmate. It’s important to be able to distinguish who was with Adolf and his ilk, and who was against.

The USA played a crucial Deus Ex Machina role in both world wars, encouraging & enabling lethal fascist German racist militarism in many ways. Now many (pseudo-) progressives in the USA vent hatred at Trump. As if Trump were culprit of what the USA did for real with its German proxy in 1914-45! It’s clearly unconscious, but those (pseudo) progressives would gain in power if they knew what truly happened, in the real world of real fascism and real racism, and how US plutocracy enacted its hatred.

In 1914-1917, the USA helped the Kaiser (and then did a 180 degrees as it became clear France and Britain were going to win). In 1933-1941, the USA and its plutocracy helped Hitler (and arguably more, as many US firms collaborated with Hitler, throughout the war… IBM, for example, from New York, through Geneva, kept on managing all the computers of Nazi Germany, all the way to May 8, 1945…)

Those who judge others, as if they knew history, should learn it first.

To finish with the traitor Pétain, traitor to France, the Republic, civilization and humanity, rightly condemned to death and national indignity. Pétain’s greatest glory in WWI was to order shot to death panicked soldiers, to make French soldiers fear their own generals more than the robotic racist fascists they were fighting. The least that could have been done, was to give him some of his own medicine, all the way. (Some, who were much less culprit than Pétain were executed; France executed up to 40,000 Nazi collaborators in 1944-45-46…)

Because it was not done, now we have ignorant, arrogant twerps telling us Pétain was a great man, at some point. One can be great, according to Macron, although one engaged in racist genocide. If Pétain had been executed, as he should have been, Macron would have reviewed his copy, before uttering his racist drivel.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

The French REPUBLIC suffered 1.4 million KIA and 4.2 million wounded, including 15,000 “gueules cassees”, soldiers with atrociously destroyed faces.  Ten billion letters between French soldiers and loved ones were exchanged.

 

Politically Correct Famous Democratic Economist Admits To Treachery of Political Leaders After 2007. Good. Yet, Why Just 2007? To Laud Plutocratic Clintonism?

It seems obvious to me that the official economic doctrine is the theoretical justification of plutocracy. Roman emperor Constantine used what he called Catholicism, his invention, to justify his increasing plutocracy. Nowadays, plutocracy is haughtily brandishing the philosophy of “economic science”. Now a famous economist looks at that, and blames everybody else. Mr. Delong is a friend and colleague of Krugman, and their ilk. We are talking here of the mainstream ideology of the self-declared “left”… Which is just stealth plutocracy: a definition of plutocracy is inequality. Inequality increased under Obama, when it reached its highest level ever (as measured by looking at the top 1%, or top .1%, etc.) Right, it’s probably getting worse under Trump… But Trump never claimed to be “left”.

***

Inequality augmented under Obama. Here is the slice 2013 until 2016. This was caused by the fact Obama helped most the bankers, hence the wealthiest…

“Blame the Economists?

Nov 1, 2018 J. Bradford Delong

Ever since the 2008 financial crash and subsequent recession, economists have been pilloried for failing to foresee the crisis, and for not convincing policymakers of what needed to be done to address it. But the upheavals of the past decade were more a product of historical contingency than technocratic failure.

BERKELEY – Now that we are witnessing what looks like the historic decline of the West, it is worth asking what role economists might have played in the disasters of the past decade.”

Unsurprisingly, famous economists protect Clinton from any blame. When, in truth, Clinton demolished the New Deal most effectively. Learning from Goldman Sachs, even before he was elected president, that, if he wanted to be re-elected he would have to do as he was ordered to, by the wealthiest men, Clinton told Robert Rubin Goldman CEO:”You are telling me by reelection depends upon fuckin bnd traders?” (Nowadays, the once famous quote has disappeared from search engines: no accident.)

Brad Delong: “From the end of World War II until 2007, Western political leaders at least acted as if they were interested in achieving full employment, price stability, an acceptably fair distribution of income and wealth, and an open international order in which all countries would benefit from trade and finance”

Patrice Ayme: Not true: Clinton, a so-called “Democrat” ruined the separation of banking and speculation (installed by president Roosevelt and Congress in 1933). Instead of serving all, banks were reset to serve mostly the wealthiest. Moreover Clinton enabled so-called “financial derivatives” with total free rein. Even more serving of the wealthiest, enabling them to leverage themselves tremendously. That led to the 2008 crisis, when a bank dealing mostly in US Treasury Bonds and an insurer, AIG, got acutely bankrupt from derivatives… with nearly all other major banks, just as bad. Bush, in accord with Obama, and then Obama alone sent to the banks all the money they needed and some.

Brad De Long: “Then came 2008, when everything changed. The goal of full employment dropped off Western leaders’ radar, even though there was neither a threat of inflation nor additional benefits to be gained from increased openness. Likewise, the goal of creating an international order that serves everyone was summarily abandoned. Both objectives were sacrificed in the interest of restoring the fortunes of the super-rich, perhaps with a distant hope that the wealth would “trickle down” someday.”

PA: Right. So why do we still call individuals like Obama, “Democrat”, and act as if they were,  when all they did was to serve the wealthiest, the plutocrats (feeding them ever since)?

De Long: “Others, like me, understood that expansionary monetary policies would not be enough; but, because we had looked at global imbalances the wrong way, we missed the principal source of risk – US financial mis-regulation.”

PA: One reform is necessary: banks are there to serve We The People and the real economy serving We The People. Banks should not serve speculation to make the wealthiest wealthier. Plutocrats hate it, so so-called “economists” can’t understand its utility (to themselves!)

De Long: “Between the financial crisis of 2008 and the political crisis of 2016 came the presidency of Barack Obama. In 2004, when he was still a rising star in the Senate, Obama had warned that failing to build a “purple America” that supports the working and middle classes would lead to nativism and political breakdown.

Yet, after the crash, the Obama administration had little stomach for the medicine that former President Franklin D. Roosevelt had prescribed to address problems of such magnitude. “The country needs…bold persistent experimentation,” Roosevelt said in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression. “It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

The fact that Obama failed to take aggressive action… With policymaking having been subjected to the malign influence of a rising plutocracy, economists calling for “bold persistent experimentation” were swimming against the tide – even though well-founded economic theories justified precisely that course of action.”

PA: Need one say more? Delong congratulates himself with the present state of affairs. But actually US society became much more unequal under Obama. Rising inequality brings the collapse of civilization: such is the lesson of history. One can’t get a worse result than collapse. Time to redefine “left” in light of increasing potential collapse..

That collapse didn’t happen yet is why we can still talk about it.

But never, in the history of humanity, has collapse seemed more likely, long-term. In no small measure, because of the cecity of official economy, which is more focused in increasing inequality than in realizing that this is another name for rising plutocracy.

Economists, like most of those working in the media, are just employees of the world’s wealthiest men. Directly, or indirectly through plutocratic universities. Plutocratic universities are not universal.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/plutocratic-universities-are-not-universal/

Nor is the present economic theory resting on a universal foundation: it rests only on pleasing plutocracy. Economy will become universal when it rests on energy itself, more exactly, Absolute Worth Energy.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/energy-is-the-fundamental-unit-of-economics/

Meanwhile, let those who managed the increase of inequality under Clinton, Bush and Obama blame others: that’s what they do best.

Patrice Ayme

We’re (Potential) CANNIBALS: LACK Of CANNIBALISM Is EVIDENCE OF PROGRESS. Montaigne’s Erroneous Multiculturalism Denied This

MONTAIGNE’S INVENTION OF THE GOOD SAVAGE was naive, anti-progress, anti-civilizational. To put it in one word: nihilistic. Dismantling Montaigne’s offensive credulity exposes the rotten roots of  grotesquely erroneous, extreme, indiscriminate so-called multiculturalism.

Abstract: Cannibalism was probably the environment in which humanity evolved, in excess of 99% of the time (see the scientific evidence below). Cannibalism was common in the Neolithic, and everywhere regulated. The discovery of cannibalism in the Americas contributed to demolish the Christian mindset. Montaigne, in particular, drew an erroneous conclusion. That error justifies today’s excessive cultural relativism (so-called “multiculturalism”), and an excuse for (“Neo”) liberalization, plutocratic globalization, and it’s little helper, Islamization (now that Christianization is collapsing, so the sheep are thinking too free and too much).

I demolish here Montaigne’s injurious, naive and unimaginative assertion that barbarity is just what we don’t do. So doing I demolish naive, unimaginative cultural relativism, re-establishing the concept of progress, and of the best of all possible civilizations (not what we have, but it could be worse).

***

Montaigne’s Extreme Cultural Relativism: Barbarians Are US:

Legend has it that Rousseau invented the lamentably unreal myth of the “Good Savage”. Reading the original writing, I just realized he may not have… Instead, it’s wise old Montaigne who invented the error of the Bon Sauvage. This monstrosity, the Good Savage, is of some consequence, as the Essays are generally viewed as an epitome of wisdom (Montaigne’s influence was enormous, for the better, on Henri III, IV and his wife, Queen Marguerite de Valois, féministe extraordinaire (among other things), and thereafter, as that good Catholic, crucially, yet unwittingly crucially helped to dismantle Christian terror; paradoxically the error I criticize today, helped to do so; by claiming everybody was a barbarian, Montaigne undermined moral religious superiority… perhaps, although Catholic that’s what he wanted).

Smart, but not that smart. And preaching this extreme multiculturalism had dreadful totalitarian consequences. Stalinism and Nazism among them. And now multiculturalism has been the main tool of global plutocratization.

Seeing Montaigne throwing overboard the concept of progress overboard came as a shock to me. The evidence can’t be denied, as it is blatant in the essay on “The Cannibals: ”we call barbarian what is not of our usage”. No, Michel, no, no, you got it all too grotesquely simplistic! And, Michel, you got it very dangerous: after all, following the erroneous Michel de Montaigne, the Nazis could call the Jews “barbarian” because, after all, they didn’t follow what the Nazis could call proper German usage…

Now, agreed “The Cannibals” was written seven years after the mad civil war of the Saint Barthelemy, ordered by the crowned plutocrats sitting pretty in the Louvres (which was crisscrossed by assassins that night). (The Duke of Sully, who barely escaped alive, esteemed 70,000 had been killed; people of Arles, down the Rhone from Lyon couldn’t drink the Rhone’s water for three months, from all the rotting corpses… the philosopher Petrus Ramus, and in Lyon the composer Claude Goudimel, among other intellectuals were killed.)

So Montaigne had good reason to be indignant, and suffer a momentary lapse of reason. Even more: all the Dark Ages was a direct consequence of that monstrous thought system, Christianism. Montaigne couldn’t say that. Very close friends and associates of Rabelais had been burned alive, just for printing books: the French plutocracy was that enlightened (Rabelais himself, an ex-Franciscan and ex-Benedictin, and a famous physician, and high level magistrate with highest level connections, including cardinals, escaped to the republic of Metz, the condemnation of the University of Paris. Others were not so favored).

I am even more of a cultural relativist than Montaigne. But I do not claim all cultures are equivalent. Far from it. Even a despicable culture can contain gems (this goes even for the Sharia!) Cultural traits, ideas and feeling can be picked and chosen, among all and any cultures, real, and imagined, to bring in nutrients into the salad of thoughts we need to forge forward into the richest world of possibilities Earthly intelligence has ever faced

***

Progress, which progress? Could Renaissance thinkers say:

Progress was hard to ascertain: the instigation of the Dark Ages by the civilizationally deranged Christians shook the very foundations of human reason. Burning nearly all books & intellectuals made it more irrecoverable.

When we look way back, now that we can reconstitute civilization through the fog of the immense destruction by the sexually deranged Christian Jihadists, we discover that the Greco-Roman empire was immensely advanced (and that empire extended well beyond direct political control: the Celts used the Greek alphabet and deities, centuries before the conquest of Gallia by the unifying Roman brutes).

23 centuries ago, around 330 BCE, the Greek scientist Pytheas headed an expedition by the Marseilles empire. Pytheas circumnavigated Britain, and  discovered the mysterious Thule: Iceland, or at least Norway, and certainly the polar circle and sea ice (his ship couldn’t advance anymore). Pytheas also discovered the method to measure the spherical Earth within 1% (often attributed to Eratosthenes, but the latter came a century later). Don’t ask today’s ignorant French: they may know what PC, but they don’t know the history of the place now known as France.

Other Marseilles’ expeditions went to Senegal, while Carthaginians captured gorillas, went around Africa, and traded with subsaharan Africa.

***

Native Americans Followed the Wrong Strategy With The Viking, Whereas Carolingian Franks Did it Right:

A thousand years ago, after following Irish monks to Iceland, the Vikings discovered a huge part of North America. The Viking were unable to hold North America militarily, though, as the Natives proved hostile, and uncontrollably so. Thus, ironically enough, American Natives organized their own demise, long-term… If the American Indians had invited the Viking in, Native Americans would have become civilizationally, militarily and biologically stronger, and could have endured!

By the way, by inviting the Viking to stay and colonize, what came to known as Normandy, the Franks put an end to their (more than a) century long war with the Scandinavians: the French were smarter than the Native Americans… Normandy also became arguably the world’s most mentally advanced place by the Eleventh Century: watch the Duke of Normandy casually tell dinners that the Earth turned around the Sun, or Berangarius de Tours,  a church authority, claiming all the god we needed was reason. Berengar was in turn discreetly protected by the Duke…

Experts may moan that the Franks got the war started by addressing ultimata to the Danes regarding Saxon refugees (in the Eighth Century)… So it was natural that after 900 CE they extend an olive branch. Yes, maybe. But it remains that the Native Americans were certainly stupid not to welcome and embrace the Vikings… And the massacre of Columbus’ men was more of the same. It’s not smart for savages to attack the gods, just after they showed up.

***

America, A Discovery Whose Time Had Come Through General Scientific Enlightenment:

But the discovery of North America was kept hushed, although maps went around, just as the existence of Inuits, one of whom paddled all the way to Scotland during the beginning of the Little Ice Age. The rich cod fishing off Cape Cod was also kept secret.

Various Portuguese sailors had determined that there was a continent west of the Azores, for example by recovering wood sculpted, but not by iron instrument, and also various trees of non-European origin, and even corpses of American natives, carried from the west by the mighty wind and currents Columbus would use to return in just 31 days.  

This Portuguese discretion was turned on its head in 1492 CE, when the queen of Castille decided to launch the veteran and irresistible Spanish army towards the New World (instead of liberating North Africa and the Middle East from Islam, as had been planned previously; 1492 was also when the Jews were thrown out, coincident to the day Columbus sailed away). A Portuguese sailor, Columbus’ father in law, had extensively travelled. His documents persuaded Columbus of the existence of the continent which became America… while his brother-in-law, Pedro Correa, produced more sculpted wood from the West…

Columbus informed the queen (the queen was less keen that her husband in pursuing Jews and Muslims to the ends of the world).The possibly Jewish Columbus sailed back on January 15 1493, reaching the Azores February 15 (after a terrible storm)! Columbus announced the discovery of lush and gold laden large islands, among them the enormous Cuba and Hispaniola. He brought back with him a few Natives. The 39 men Viceroy Columbus had left behind in a fort, were killed to the last man by the Natives (who were later themselves annihilated: just as with the Viking, Native Americans would have been smarter to welcome the powerful, knowledgeable strangers and insure their safety, come what may…).

By the mid sixteenth educated Europeans had fully realized that much of the world thought and lived very differently from what they called “Christendom”. No thinker viewed Europe more critically in the light of the habits of the natives of the “New World” than Michel de Montaigne. He gathered much evidence from an employee of his, a Normand who had lived ten years in Brazil among the Natives (and who was used as a translator). Montaigne describes his Normand as “un homme simple et grossier”. The Normand (and thus Montaigne) described mostly the Tupinamba of Brazil.

Here are the most famous extracts from the Essais from the essay “Des Cannibales”. After making the apology of cannibalism, Montaigne concludes:

Nous les pouvons donc bien appeler barbares, eu égard aux règles de la raison, mais non pas eu égard à nous, qui les surpassons en toute sorte de barbarie. Leur guerre est toute noble et généreuse, et a autant d’excuse et de beauté que cette maladie humaine peut en recevoir…

(Personal) Translation:

We may therefore call them barbarous, by judging them according to the rules of reason, but not relatively to ourselves, who surpass them in all sorts of barbarism. Their war is all noble and generous, and has as much excuse and beauty as this human disease can receive …

But there is worse on Montaigne’s part:

“Or je trouve, pour revenir à mon propos, qu’il n’y a rien de barbare et de sauvage en cette nation, à ce qu’on m’en a rapporté, sinon que CHACUN APPELLE BARBARIE CE QUI N’EST PAS DE SON USAGE; comme de vrai, il semble que nous n’avons autre critère (“mire”) de la vérité et de la raison que l’exemple et idée des opinions et usages du pays où nous sommes. Là est toujours la parfaite religion, le parfait gouvernement (“police”), parfait et accompli usage de toutes choses. Ils sont sauvages, de même que nous appelons sauvages les fruits que nature, de soi et de son progrès ordinaire, a produits : là où à la vérité, ce sont ceux que nous avons altérés par notre artifice et détournés de l’ordre commun, que nous devrions appeler sauvages.”

Essays, l. I, chap. XXXI, “Cannibals”,

Folio, Volume 1, Gallimard, p. 305 sq.

Now, to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous or savage in this nation, as far as I have been told, except that EVERYONE CALLS BARBARIAN WHAT IS NOT OF HIS OWN USAGE (1); in truth, it seems that we have no other test of truth and reason than the example and idea of ​​the opinions and usages of the country where we live. There, in that country of ours, is always the perfect religion, the perfect police, perfect and accomplished use of all things. They are savage, just as we call savages the fruits which nature, of itself and of its ordinary progress, has produced: where, in truth, they are those which we have altered by our artifice and diverted from the common order, that we should call savages (2).

***

Montaigne relaunched a tradition of using non-European peoples as a basis for engaging in a critique of Euro-Greco-Roman own culture. However Montaigne also went where (most) antique thinkers had not. He engaged in simplistic analysis, worthy of a 6 years old, undoubtedly in the process romanticizing what Jean-Jacques Rousseau would later celebrate. It is a theme which still appeals to many West-hating Westerners.

**************************************************************************

Montaigne:

. . . “ I do not find that there is anything barbaric or savage about this nation, according to what I’ve been told, unless we are to call barbarism whatever differs from our own customs. Indeed, we seem to have no other standard of truth and reason than the opinions and customs of our own country. There at home is always the perfect religion, the perfect legal system–the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything.

These people are wild in the same sense that fruits are, produced by nature, alone, in her ordinary way. Indeed, in that land, it is we who refuse to alter our artificial ways and reject the common order that ought rather to be called wild, or savage.  In them the most natural virtues and abilities are alive and vigorous, whereas we have bastardized them and adopted them solely to our corrupt taste. Even so, the flavor and delicacy of some of the wild fruits from those countries is excellent, even to our taste, better than our cultivated ones. After all, it would hardly be reasonable that artificial breeding should be able to outdo our great and powerful mother, Nature. We have so burdened the beauty and richness of her works by our innovations that we have entirely stifled her. Yet whenever she shines forth in her purity she puts our vain and frivolous enterprises amazingly to shame. . . . All our efforts cannot create the nest of the tiniest bird: its structure, its beauty, or the usefulness of its form; nor can we create the web of the lowly spider. All things, said Plato are produced by nature, chance, or human skill, the greatest and most beautiful things by one of the first two, the lesser and most imperfect, by the latter. . . .

These nations seem to me, then, barbaric in that they have been little refashioned by the human mind and are still quite close to their original naivety. They are still ruled by natural laws, only slightly corrupted by ours. They are in such a state of purity that I am sometimes saddened by the thought that we did not discover them earlier, when there were people who would have known how to judge them better than we. It displeases me that Lycurgus or Plato didn’t know them, for it seems to me that these peoples surpass not only the portraits which poetry has made of the Golden Age and all the invented, imaginary notions of the ideal state of humanity, but even the conceptions and the very aims of philosophers themselves. They could not imagine such a pure and simple naivety as we encounter in them; nor would they have been able to believe that our society might be maintained with so little artifice and social structure.

***

Yes, Indeed, Cannibals Are Us, to the point we have cannibal DNA:

One thing Montaigne is right on, is to view cannibalism as nothing special. To quote Wikipedia:

“Among modern humans, cannibalism has been practiced by various groups.[25] It was practiced by humans in Prehistoric Europe,[35][36] Mesoamerica[37] South America,[38]among Iroquoian peoples in North America,[39] Māori in New Zealand,[40] the Solomon Islands,[41] parts of West Africa[17] and Central Africa,[17] some of the islands of Polynesia,[17] New Guinea,[42] Sumatra,[17] and Fiji.[43] Evidence of cannibalism has been found in ruins associated with the Ancestral Puebloans of the Southwestern United States as well as (at Cowboy Wash in Colorado).[44][45][46] “

Not just this: the evidence of cannibalism in humans is at least 600,000 years old. There are two reasons for it, I reckon: proteins were hard to find in the past. But not just this: by eating humans themselves, humans prevented predators to acquire a taste for human flesh, a paramount security consideration  around potentially human eating predators. Eating dead humans is then, indeed, nothing special, having two good reasons for it. What of the possibility of prion disease? (That was found in North Africa, and the Fore of New Guinea, who were too enthusiastic in eating their parents, causing the prion disease kuru).

In 2003, a publication in Science magazine suggested that prehistoric humans practiced extensive cannibalism, to the point human genetics adapted to this practice. According to this research, genetic markers commonly found in modern humans, worldwide, suggest that today many people carry a gene providing protection against the brain diseases that can be spread by consuming human brain tissue… A study of the Fore, an isolated tribe living in Papua New Guinea by Simon Mead, John Collinge and colleagues, at the MRC’s Prion Unit at University College London, found evidence that a gene variant arose in some of the Fore to protect against a deadly prion disease transmitted by their former cannibalistic habits. Prion diseases include CJD in humans and BSE – mad cow disease – in cattle.

The team found from analysing DNA samples that the same protective gene variant is common in people all over the world. This led the researchers to conclude that it evolved when cannibalism was widespread, in order to shield cannibals from prion diseases lurking in the flesh of victims.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18172-gene-change-in-cannibals-reveals-evolution-in-action/

A DNA debate ensued, but my hunch is that the cannibalistic protection gene has got to exist, for the ubiquitous reasons I gave. Why New Guinea Highlanders are susceptible may have to do paradoxically with cannibalism being less practiced in that lush area since it was colonized by humans…

I suggested that cannibalism had, in part to do with not giving predators a taste for human flesh (notice the expression). Guess what? Native mammal fauna of New Guinea lacks large predators, so what I see as a main reason for cannibalism was absent in New Guinea! (Right, there are both Saltwater and Freshwater crocodiles in New Guinea, but those saurians are not smart enough to develop distinguished and cultural culinary habits, differently from felines, hyenas, canids, bears, eagles, etc.)

***

Montaigne had little imagination:

If eating dead humans is then, indeed, nothing special, having two good reasons for it, not eating humans is a deviation from normalcy. Thus, not eating humans is an indication of civilization, that most striking anomaly life ever evolved.

In the 21th Century, the Disney company has a problem: patrons spreading around the ashes of their loved ones (which they put in medication bottles as large containers are checked). Haunted houses are a preferred place. People can be weird, but there is nothing weird about cannibalism (psychiatrist associations have refused to label cannibalism a mental disease).

The word “cannibalism” is derived from Caníbales, the Spanish name for the Caribs, whom Columbus encountered. (Some say the Spaniards invented the word in analogy with the Latin “canis”, mixing it with the sound for the karina as the islanders described themselves). Dog eat dog, in other words… In any case, “cannibalism” was introduced in France in 1515 CE.  

Spanish conquistadores observed that the Carib Indians were cannibals who regularly ate roasted human flesh. There is evidence as to the taking of human trophies and the ritual cannibalism of war captives among both Carib and other Amerindian groups such as the Arawak and Tupinamba (the ones from Brazil Montaigne knew best). The Caribs themselves were invaders from South America, having arrived around 1200 and displaced the indigenous Tainos. With the Mexican Aztecs, cannibalism took industrial proportions (and turned out into their undoing).

In long prose I will not bother to reproduce here, Montaigne makes an idyllic description of cannibalism: something that happened peacefully after death. What a dearth of imagination!

Real cannibalism is something else. Did Montaigne think about the problem of indigestion? One does not want to eat too much meat at one time. How to preserve the meat, when one has no salt, no cold drying wind, no deep freezing lakes? Well, one can eat the meat, one piece at a time. Over a period of weeks.

In 1910, the American anthropologist, A P Rice, described how the people of the Marquesas Islands ritualistically killed their captives.

“First, they broke their legs, to stop them running away, then they broke their arms, to stop them resisting. This was an unhurried killing, because the Marquesans enjoyed observing their victim contemplating his fate. Eventually, the man would be skewered and roasted.”

Nuku Hiva has a population of just over 2000 and has a history of cannibalism, but the practice was believed to have ceased. Not so sure. In any case, when battling the enemy, eating him, or her, can be viewed as the ultimate insult. So it was perceived for many cannibalisms, such as the one in New Zealand.(Dishonoring the dead is a long practice for cherished enemies: see Obama with Bin Laden.)

***

If One Really Hates Them, One May As Well, Eat Them Alive:

(No, I won’t tweet that one! Such a statement will be evilly contextualized by the ill-minded and the mentally challenged…)

Long ago, I read extensive nineteenth century description of cannibalism in Oceania (I searched but could not find references). It goes from the humoristic to the grim. On the humoristic side, that time when the British delegation to New Zealand was invited to celebrate a treaty with the Maoris, with an extensive Luau comprising many roasted Natives.

That we have so much indications of cannibalism in Oceania is per the nature of islands (small, no extensive crops to raid after killing the peasants), and the fact these were Neolithic societies, equivalent to those found in Europe before the Mesopotamian farmers and their intensive agriculture crops colonized Europe, 7,000 years ago… (So, it’s not anti-Pacific Islander racism; actually the ethnicities of those islanders vary a lot, between Filipino derived and Melanesian… History is complicated, and not PC, as the case of New Zealand shows…)

One grim truth is that, in hot tropical climate, without refrigeration, some captives were eaten, ALIVE,  piece by piece over a period of days, or even weeks (not to say that Europeans wouldn’t do such a thing: the assassin of one of the “Orange” leaders of the Netherlands, William the Silent, was publicly tortured to death over several days).

The necessity to eat some people alive, under some circumstances, illustrates clearly that cannibalism, or the absence thereof, is dependent upon the environment and technology, not just the “mores”: there are widespread rumors that the Wehrmacht resorted to cannibalism in Stalingrad (in any case, the Wehrmacht’s Sixth Army resorted to practices, like torture to death, which are fully documented, in Poland, France, and Russia…)

***

Conclusion: As an indication of barbarity, eating people is neither here, nor there. Eating corpses when there is no other choice, is viewed as correct, even in the most conservative societies. The real barbarity is to set-up, or contribute to set-up, or tolerate situations where cannibalism would be a natural outcome. It goes without saying that, in a world of 8 billion people highly dependent on international trade to feed themselves (most energy is traded, at this point), a serious war would disrupt trade, and invite cannibalism.

Montaigne, by claiming that what we do not practice we view as barbaric, and, by claiming implicitly that this was legitimate, or by transmogrifying cannibalism into something nice, voided the concept of barbarity from any content.

To stay attached to the notion of progress, we have to be able to distinguish between what is bad and what is better. For example, having a situation where one has to eat one’s enemy alive is bad, and a situation in which we have no enemy is better.

Montaigne, dejected by the Saint Bartholomew massacre launched by his Catholic party was led to hint that Catholics viewed Protestants as barbaric, just because of their different ways (“usage”). Understood. However, the concept that barbarity is entirely relative has since taken a life of its own: one can see it loud and clear in Nazism (Himmler recommended to his men, after their daily massacres, of civilians, women and children, to immerse themselves to eternal German culture, complete with soothing classical music).

Cultural multiculturalism, in its extreme contemporary form, claims we can’t judge other cultures. Or even other cultures’ ideas and practices. If religiously endowed, the more horrendous practices, sexual mutilations or executions, are tolerated.

For example, Pakistan’s court condemned a young Christian woman, Asia Noreen – commonly known as Asia Bibi, to be executed for allegedly insulting Islam during a dispute with neighbors (she already spent eight years on death row). The Pakistan Supreme Court ordered her freed in November 2018, but she was left in prison as the Islamists called for her death. Her senior male lawyer, saying he regretted nothing, fled Pakistan.

Such behaviors from powers in Pakistan depict barbarity unchained: in the place known as Pakistan, at some point Jihadists invaded, and imposed their barbarity (centuries after Christianism peacefully seduced Pakistanis). That Islamists use terror doesn’t make terror any less barbaric. Michel de Montaigne would have us believe that, because terror is a usage of Jihadists, we shouldn’t call it barbaric, as they use it, and we, the secular civilians, don’t. Well, that’s swine level reasoning.

We can only love those we can debate, as, at worst, they provide us with the occasion to prove them wrong. At best, they make us more intelligent, wiser and knowledgeable, making us stronger. So I love Montaigne more than ever, even though my esteem for him went down a lot, while Rousseau’s, to my dismay, went up.

I am a real multicultural, multilingual, even multi continental fanatic. I even call Chinese history home, although I grew up (mostly) in Africa. Good multiculturalism is to pick and choose particular elements of the hundreds of culture we have at our disposal, and reject others we find horrid. I understand what Native North Americans were up to, with their tortures to death. I also understand and appreciate the psychology and traditions which motivated the “47 Ronins“. I know very well that some Africans traits viewed as primitive, are actually more advanced. But in all this there is one meta principles: some ideas and feelings are more advanced than others. Comparing, or accepting, cultures wholesale is naive, even criminal.

Patrice Ayme

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Notes:

1. Parroted by Levi Strauss in Race et Histoire, Unesco, 1952, pp. 19 sq.

“Dans les Grandes Antilles, quelques années après la découverte de l’Amérique, pendant que les Espagnols envoyaient des commissions d’enquête pour rechercher si les indigènes possédaient ou non une âme, ces derniers s’employaient à immerger des blancs prisonniers afin de vérifier par une surveillance prolongée si leur cadavre était ou non, sujet à la putréfaction.

Cette anecdote à la fois baroque et tragique illustre bien le paradoxe du relativisme culturel (que nous retrouverons ailleurs sous d’autres formes) : c’est dans la mesure même où l’on prétend établir une discrimination entre les cultures et les coutumes que l’on s’identifie le plus complètement avec celles qu’on essaye de nier. En refusant l’humanité à ceux qui apparaissent comme les plus “sauvages” ou ” barbares ” de ses représentants, on ne fait que leur emprunter une de leurs attitudes typiques. Le barbare, c’est d’abord l’homme qui croit à la barbarie.”

Notice that this piece of brain-dead sophistry minded devious apology of extreme multiculturalism was published by the United Nations. Now the UN can be proud that non-Muslims get executed in Pakistan for just being non-Muslim (as many Islam texts say they should).

Translation: “In the Greater Antilles, a few years after the discovery of America, while the Spaniards sent commissions of inquiry to find out whether the natives had a soul or not, the natives were trying to immerse white prisoners to check by prolonged surveillance if their body was or was not, subject to putrefaction.

This baroque and tragic anecdote illustrates the paradox of cultural relativism (which we will find elsewhere in other forms): it is to the very extent that we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs that we identify ourselves most completely with those we try to deny. By denying humanity to those who appear to be the most “savage” or “barbarian” of its representatives, one only borrows one of their typical attitudes. The barbarian is first and foremost the man who believes in barbarism.”

“The barbarian is first and foremost the man who believes in barbarism?” that’s Levi-Strauss parroting Montaigne, denying there is such a thing as barbarity. Here Levi Strauss is poorly informed, repeating mindlessly a racist insult (against Spaniards): the notion of Indians having a soul was never put in doubt by the Spaniards: that’s precisely why they tried to convert them to Catholicism, as ordered by the Pope! Thus, irony of ironies, the holier-than-thou Levi-Strauss proclaims those who believe in barbarity barbarians, while himself indulging in fake news, fake, and racially insulting data, trying to make us believe that the Conquistadors were themselves delirious stupid racist brutes (they could be as brutish as needed, but were nether racist, nor stupid: for example, Cortez’s relationship with La Malinche, a multilingual Yucatan Princess, was crucial for the conquest… He recognized the children.)

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(2) Rousseau parroted Montaigne, but not just... It is often said that Rousseau parroted Montaigne, but, reading the originals, I didn’t find just this. Instead I found this:

Ce qu’il y a de plus cruel, encore, c’est que, tous les progrès de l’espèce humaine l’éloignant sans cesse de son état primitif, plus nous accumulons de nouvelles connaissances et plus nous nous ôtons les moyens d’acquérir la plus importante de toutes, et que c’est en un sens à force d’étudier l’homme que nous nous sommes mis hors d’état de le connaître.

“What is most cruel, still, is that, as all the progress of the human species constantly removes it ever more from its primitive state, the more we accumulate new knowledge and the more we take away from us the means to acquire the most important knowledge of all, and that it is in a sense the more we study man, the more we put ourselves out of the state necessary to know him.”

This is correct in the sense of the salons Rousseau frequented, but not in the sense of laboratories exploring dendrites and neurotransmitters. Such a quote is also extremely far from the myth of the “Bon Sauvage” attributed to Rousseau…

However it remains that Rousseau held that men in a state of nature do not know good and evil, but their independence, along with “the peacefulness of their passions, and their ignorance of vice”, keep them from doing ill (A Discourse…, 71-73). Curious that Rousseau never heard of the systematic usage of lethal, prolonged torture among North American Natives, as the way to end prisoners’ lives… That was extremely well documented and known at the time, so one can see Rousseau was extremely biased, to the point of idiocy.

I tied in Montaigne’s divagations with Jihadism. So did Rousseau, I discovered after I wrote the preceding… except that Rousseau approves of Jihadism, Christian or Islamist, and approves of burning libraries:

“They say that Caliph Omar, when consulted about what had to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered as follows: ‘If the books of this library contain matters opposed to the Koran, they are bad and must be burned. If they contain only the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway, for they are superfluous.’ Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. However, suppose Gregory the Great was there instead of Omar and the Gospel instead of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and that might well have been the finest moment in the life of this illustrious pontiff.”

― Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1st Discourse) and Polemics

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3) So what’s barbarian?

Barbarian is relative to the circumstances. For example, many elements of the doctrine advocated by Muhammad, in his day, and age, and place of worship, was not barbarian… but, just the opposite, progressive! However, now, it both barbarian and regressive.  

Christianism, though, is another matter. When Constantine imposed “Catholic Orthodoxy” that was definitively barbarian and regressive. It opened an anti-intellectual abyss under Greco-Roman civilization it collapsed into.

PA