Why To Kill God: Because Deicide Will Help Limit Wealth Absolutely

Humanity, the genus Homo, did well for 5 million years without God. Finding food, water, and surviving were good enough deities to get the genus Homo’s psychology by.

But now we have individuals going around, proclaiming the absurdity of life (Camus and his ilk)… To find meaning, they need lions to show up, so they can think upright, and they don’t know it. They have become like sheep, as Christian propaganda insisted their were… whereas lions ran away from their distant ancestors. Running after lions was all the religion our ancestors needed, when they showed up.

If humanity is so ferocious, and self reliant, why would humanity have ever needed gods? Men were the gods.

Who needs gods? The difference is civilization, and, more precisely, its military aspect and the cancerous growth known as plutocracy.

When one is a tyrant, the last thing one needs is to have as subjects, men who believe they are gods… And this is true for bankers, today’s real gods, and they hide their malevolence behind their arrogant deluded little boys: Clinton, Major, Bliar Blair, Bush, Obama, Trump, Macron… And they half demented girls: Thatcher, Merkel, May…

Catholicism was invented and imposed by emperor (“Saint”) Constantine, and his tyrannical successors (in Arabic: caliphs). In turn, Catholicism was the proximal cause of the military collapse of the Roman state, without any question. Islam was a bellicose ideology of Muhammad which enabled him to seize Arabia. Muhammad’s two immediate successors, companions and accomplices, Abu Bakr and Umar were immediately capable of building a gigantic empire, thanks to that immensely ferocious religion. They crushed the Persian and Roman empires, in a few years. Believers in Islam believe they sit with god after death, if they fight for Islam, or Muhammad.

Don’t think it’s over: watch Indonesia, where Islam is creeping back everyday some more (the president there suggested recently to release the mastermind of Islamist terror there…)

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Our ancestors at work: no need for Gods to chase cats. The story there is that the cheetahs were hunting impalas next to a dam. Jackals gave the alert, and baboons decided to encircle and then suddenly charge the cheetahs, to remove them from the premises…Baboons will act that way, even against lions. Our ancestors were expert at that, even 20 million years ago. I have met chimpanzees in lion territory with very few very small trees around, and they tried to frighten me (differently from the lions, who just went away).

Catholicism profited Roman Catholic plutocracy:

Those who think Catholicism didn’t bring the collapse of the Roman state should know the major facts (they don’t). It did, 100% (although the cause of Roman Catholicism itself was Roman military fascism, itself a consequence of plain old Roman financial fascism… for contemporary banks, see below).

In particular Roman Catholicism was proximally causal in the fall of the empire, when the Occidental part of the empire was led by Frankish generalissimo Arbogast. Arbogast had long been emperor in all but name. His Frankish nature prevented him (at the time) to be elected to the Purple. The emperor Theodosius had established terror decrees against “heretics” since 380 CE. Those led to the devastation of the empire’s intelligence, culture, libraries, books, spirits, and intellectuals… Let alone the Jews and whoever Theodosius wanted killed.

Arbogast tried to reestablish religious plurality, and civilizational sanity. So the Catholic fanatic, emperor Theodosius of the Oriental part, went to war. The mostly Frankish Roman army of the West got, barely, killed by Theodosius, thanks to a hurricane and the Goths, at the battle of the Frigidus river, September 5-6, 394 CE.

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No More Western Roman Army… So Back to More Savage Franks:

Result? After Arbogast’s soldiers got killed at Frigidus, so was the Roman army in the West (although Germans were constantly attacking the Roman Germanias). Theodosius, sole emperor, died in 395 CE. Within six years, the government of bishops which by then led Rome, called onto (much less Romanized) Franks to protect the provinces of Gallia and the two Germanias; but in 406 CE, 12 years after the disaster at the Frigidus, Germanic nations broke through the Frankish curtain, and invaded the Western empire. In particular, the Vandals invaded all the way to Africa, et present day Tunisia. There they established a maritime empire, and blocked grain supplies to the gigantic city of Rome, and most of Italy. Rome fell to the Goths in 410 CE. Actually the king of the Goths, Aleric, had commanded the Gothic forces fighting the Romanized Franks at Frigidus. Small world: the eternal return of the same, just as bankers nowadays.

The government of bishops viewed those who were not fanatically Catholic, and obedient as heretics to be destroyed. They didn’t just destroy independent individuals, but the entire Republican organization, by destroying culture, libraries, books full of (non-Catholic) wisdom. The destruction, by torture, of individuals such as Hypatia and major libraries, such as the one in Alexandria are examples of this situation.

Less well known, is that the bishops forbade the death penalty. Thus highways were thereafter paralyzed by bandits: incarceration, besides slavery, was not possible in antiquity. Also plutocratic families (which often had a bishop) couldn’t be forced to pay taxes.

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Catholicism and Islam were most profitable to the leaders claiming to “believe” in them during the Middle Ages:

Catholicism brought the collapse of the Roman empire in the West. The Franks, in the late Fifth Century, took over completely, and  reestablished the situation by reimposing a modicum of tolerance, and then a lot of innovations. And, first of all, mandatory secular education between the Sixth and Eighth centuries (generally uniquely attributed to Charlemagne, erroneously, as the fighting against the Papacy was during the Sixth Century). This Frankish spirit of overture and advancing civilization was weaponized to conquer Europe. Main events: elimination of the Goths, 507 CE, final colonization and domestication of the Saxons by Charlemagne in a 30 year war, 800 CE; reconquest of Britain and Southern Italy, Sicily, late Eleventh Century.

However, the conjugation of grievous Frankish civil war (Battle/massacre of Fontenoy) contemporaneous with multiple simultaneous deep invasions by Viking, Avars and Muslims, brought a disintegration of the empire. It’s not that the empire collapsed like the Assyrians in 614 BCE, or Nazi Germany in 1945. Instead, West Francia, exasperated by the military inefficiency of the empire, broke away from the rest, and then exploded in turn into around 60 states of diverse natures, through militaristic localization, also known as the Feudal Order.

Great lords of the Eleventh Century were plutocrats who would have been without justification for except the violence of their military feats… if not for the heavenly justification of violence by the Bible. Hence Bible god came back: a resurgence of terroristic, mysogynistic and pedophiliac Catholicism, starting around 1026 CE (when an entire religious establishment of a French city was burned alive by the Papacy… Crusades followed, two generations later…).  

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So “god” provided the metaphysical backup for degenerating Roman plutocracy and the Feudal Order. What about more modern times? Why were Americans so Christian “god” obsessed?

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God provided solace after giving reasons to eliminate the Natives:

The Bible is full of holocausts ordered by god, and king David is punished most horribly for refusing to destroy a nation: his son is tortured to death by god, over a week.

Hence, when the “Pilgrims” got to the New World, they extolled the riches of America (relative to Europe) to their kind left in Europe, urging them to come… And space the Pilgrims made by killing, enslaving and scalping the Natives: it was the Bible all over again: grabbing the “Promised Land”, by extermination of the preceding inhabitants…  

God enabled to do what Constantine or Muhammad, and their successors did with it; kill one’s opponents, because god ordered it. Falling asleep while the bankers make deals with Hitler, Franco, and their ilk? Indeed! Once one has eliminated the Natives (as was done in the Americas and Australia), what is left of the need for god? Acquiring the mentalities of lambs!

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God as Daddy or Mummy for baby lambs:

For modern Americans God became just a guarantee of perpetual infancy. The god-thing obsession? If we please a superior being, we will do better, s/he will take care of us. In other words, babyhood, all over again.

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Attali to the Rescue:

Before the US Revolution, many Americans believed in a much more natural form of divinity. It turns out that, when a deity dictate what is right and wrong, it’s actually “The Man” who decides what is right or wrong.

Now we have a more serious situation than pleasing The Man.

In particular, bankers are in command of the planet: Clinton, and then Obama made sure of it. Their rewards were colossal, and much appreciated by their tiny mind.

However, the times for gravitas has come. Jacques Attali, who is in very good position to know about bankers (he headed a totally major European bank, among many high level positions he had), warns us that a financial calamity, just like the preceding one, is around the corner.

See:

Democratic Illusion and Capitalist Cynicism

(I will write an essay on it, if I find the time…)

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Attali says the bankers are back to industrial sized evil, worse than 2008. Why are the bankers back to their nefarious ways?

In part because Obama would finish all his discourses, certifying, like G. W. Bush, or Clinton, that “God bless America”. So the US lambs were satisfied, and have been bleating contently ever since. Their bankers’ boy, Obama, was excellent, as the color of his skin testified, they said, with characteristic, we-believe-in-bible-god psychology.

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LIMIT WEALTH ABSOLUTELY: Elizabeth WARREN To The rescue:

(Ex-Harvard law professor) Senator Elizabeth Warren is running for president. To my surprised amazement, she rolled out her financial program last week: she proposes enormous taxes on the super wealthy. 2% of wealth above 50 millions, and even more, higher up.

Senator Warren’s wealth tax would be the way I would implement limiting wealth absolutely.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/limit-wealth-absolutely/

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/12/28/limit-wealth-absolutely-ii-great-wealth-steers-elite-leadership-referendums-to-fix-it-all/

Let’s keep our cynical fingers crossed that Warren’s wealth tax is not just a trick to keep Sanders from running again…  (She used to be way milder, nearly timid…)

In France, Rothschild merger and acquisition banker Macron, another boy president, ignorant of all, but for manipulating the lambs, removed the wealth tax (the yellow jackets want it reinstated). That particular wealth tax was too restrictive, I say. But Macron said the wealthy French would then flee to other countries… like the USA. Well, with Warren as president that would be easily fixed…

The USA taxes worldwide already: so wealthy US citizens won’t be able to escape (all the more as the French Republic is also learning from US ways and means…)

And for that change of taxation, what do we need? We need for US citizens to realize they have been kept in infancy by their increasing plutocracy (“In God We Trust”, borrowed from the Nazi army, was installed in US minds by the US Congress only in 1954…)

For Americans to graduate from infancy, they need to reject “god” and go back to their revolutionary roots… which were decidedly secular, we have that secularism in writing, from the most official documents by the US Founding Fathers… Philosophical infancy was nice, but it’s all over, the lions of fate are onto us now.

Amen.

Patrice Ayme

 

To Understand Nazi Germany Well, Understand Twentieth Century USA

Why did the German army fight to the bitter end in World War 2?

Patrice Ayme

Truly the world war launched by Germany in 1914 (and plotted in a conspiracy as early as 1912), finished in May 1945. As soon as WWI was put in limbo (“armistice” of November 11, 1918), Germany prepared the next round, training its tanks secretly in… the USSR, of all places (hence the German delusion of knowing the Soviets well enough to defeat them).

One has to realize that Germany was at war again by 1936… In Spain… where its engagement was crucial to enable the fascists to win (the Luftwaffe carried the rebel army to Spain from Africa, among other things… thanks to US oil, from Texaco…) That is 18 years after the defeat of 1914–1918, Germany was at war again, with full US plutocratic help (the rebel army in Spain was completely US equipped, the equipment generously lent by crafty US plutocrats). (This Nazi war started in 1936 made the Wehrmacht fully trained, and thus it gave it a huge advantage for the crucial week after May 10, in 1940: by the time the French and British learned to sort out the crucial details, it was too late… The Battle of France, and its three million casualties had been lost. )

World War One, started by the fascist German Second Reich, nearly finished in tragedy for the invaders, after the tremendous French counterattack of the First Battle of Marne (5 weeks after the initial invasion). Then the Western front stayed static and hopeless, until the Second Battle of the Marne. By then the US had stopped sending ammunition material to Germany (the US had broken the Franco-British blockade, through the Netherlands!) By 1918, the French were outgunning the Germans something like one German shell to thirty French shells. The Germans were rolled back under tremendous French artillery fire… And then US troops got engaged, soon even accompanied by French tanks… 

French city of Saint Lo, Destroyed by US Bombardment, night of June 6 to 7, 1944. There were much more US bombardments in WWII destroying France than the Nazis ever did. By orders of magnitude. Some of those bombardments clearly targeted the French industrial base… and the presence of Nazis was just a pretext! (Not exactly the case of Saint Lo which suffered more than 11,000 US casualties: those Nazis could be hard to kill…)

By November 1918, the German army was finished, overwhelmed by tanks, shells and even Allied planes. All it could do was destroy and devastate north-east France as it retreated. Then came the armistice. The Germans had fought in the lands they had invaded… not in Germany itself.

The Kaiser quit, the German Fleet self-destroyed at Scapa Flow, but otherwise little changed. Germany was not invaded. Germany refused to pay French reparations (parts of France are still destroyed and forbidden, a century later!)

Germany even formally stayed the “Second Reich” (“Weimar Republic” was not the official term). The Germans behind the 1914 attack became partisans of what became the Nazi Party, and they invented the Nazi spirit: all what happened to Germany was other people’s fault (the “Slavs”, the French, the Jews, Versailles, Communists, and others who “stabbed the German army in the back”…)

The “stabbing in the back” myth was particularly strong. The theme was that the German army had not been defeated by the Allies, but by traitors inside Germany: so traitors were shot, starting in 1919. “Stabbing in the back” was scathingly suggested by a British general in jest to generalissimo Ludendorff (Ludendorff had claimed as much, that victory had been around the corner… but those pesky German traitors). Ludendorff, who was in the Nazi Party before Hitler, ran away with the concept.

German corpse at Toulon, August 1944. 16,000 French troops attacked, 17,000 Germans surrendered… And 8,000 Germans were killed… In total, more than 5.3 million German soldiers (including SS) died in combat. Most of them after, clearly, the war was certain to be lost, and the cause abominable…

So come 1945, no decent German wanted to surrender. The notion of decency in Germany had become indecent. All the more as the Germans knew, deep down inside, that they had committed crimes against humanity against Soviets and Jews, and others.

In 1919, German crimes against humanity had been ignored, because the USA wanted to own Germany, not punish it.

Instead, the French Republic, under no illusion that the German racist mass homicidal madness had been cured, wanted to defang Germany, rendering it incapable of another attack against the world and civilization…

However, another indecent, racist, mass homicidal German attack is exactly what the smartest, racist and most cruel Anglosphere influencers wanted. Hence top diplomat Lord Keynes (British) wrote that racist pamphlet: “The Economic Consequences of Peace…”… which inspired the Nazis in turn, one more reason to make them believe that the Anglo-Saxon elite had their back… just as their predecessors had believed the same about the USA in June 1914… Or they themselves had believed in 1933–1940… when the US favored the Nazis and opposed the French.

Hitler and a few others remembered that Frederick II of Prussia, faced by an enormous coalition of superpowers (France, Austria, Russia) was miraculously saved from extinction at the last moment…

First Bombing of Berlin Was By The French in 1940 (in retaliation for bombing of French cities…). Thereafter British Night Bombing started. This is how it looked in 1945…

In the end, Hitler, maybe realizing he had been a pawn of “US plutocrats” (a notion he used) hoped that, at the last moment, the Western Allies would regain their senses, make a unilateral ceasefire with the Nazis, and sweep away the Stalinian Soviets. That’s indeed what Patton obviously thought… So he pointed out his Third Army could be in Berlin before the Soviets.

And Patton was right. Zhukov and his armies around Berlin had only 200 tanks still functioning by May 1, 1945. Moreover, Zhukov, had he wanted to do so, could have easily made a coup against Stalin.

Many in the Nazi elite had been more than chummy with the Americans: Henry Ford financed Hitler massively, even before 1923. US plutocrats, through their ownership of the Hamburg Amerika Line armed the Nazis with contraband weapons in 1932. The civil war then allowed the nazis to kill 10,000 of their enemies inside Germany. A Nazi minister commented a bit later:”When I hear the word “culture” I pull out my Browning.” Indeed, the Nazis were armed with contraband US Browning pistols… The Nazi economic miracle was a US economic miracle. The Nazi economy and society was entangled with the USA (from IBM, which had a Nazi monopoly, to Harvard songs, recycled by the Nazis…)

Thus, in top Nazi circles, the hope was strong that the USA would turn around at the last moment. The Nazis had understood nothing, and in particular they had not understood why the USA had let them be.

What the top Nazis didn’t realize is that they had been played, all along: US plutocrats wanted the world, and the Nazis, and the Soviets, were their tools. That meant US plutocrats and their servants wanted half of Europe occupied by the Soviets.

General Eisenhower was on the plot. Patton, his old professor, who finished WWI as a colonel wounded in a tank attack, was not. So Patton went to the press, saying the five million men strong, superbly equipped Allied army, with its air dominance, could occupy all of Germany. In retort, Eisenhower wrote directly to Stalin, to reassure the latter that he would have half of Europe. (Notice that Eisenhower was far from the top: there were supposedly two layers of command between him and the heads of states of the West… Clearly Eisenhower knew something not yet in history books!)

Stalin occupying half of Europe justified the occupation of the other half of Europe by US forces…. Thus the USA was quickly able to seize all European empires, worldwide (so-called “decolonization” and the triumph of the “American Century” and “Neoliberalism”).

Trying to understand Nazism without understanding the racist, greedy US elite, which suggested, enabled and financed it, is like hoping to understand a world conquering carriage by interviewing the ass pulling it… instead of the driver directing it.

Patrice Ayme

 

Debt As Tax Deferred, Or Why Public Debt For Public Interest Works Boosts The Economy

… In A Way No Private Spending can replace

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY BOOSTED BY PUBLIC SPENDING FROM GOVERNMENT DEBT:

IN THE LAST decade, the US has happily run massive deficits. Under Obama, deficits were often around 10% of GDP, or more. Obama deficits peaked at 15% of US GDP. Meanwhile, the US economy grew so much, it overtook the entire, growing, European GDP output (UK included). In 2017 US nominal GDP was 19 trillion dollars, just above the EU GDP (which is still higher at PPP, $23 T). US yearly GDP, charging ahead at a Chinese like clip, has passed $20 trillions as these lines are written.

The Obama spirit of deficit was happily pursued by Trump… And now the new Democratic controlled Congress, wisely enough, has not uttered a peep about this (it prefers to distract its audience with the notion of billionaire Trump as an agent of Putin).

Each three months of 2018 America’s federal government borrowed nearly $320 billion, or about 6% of quarterly GDP. The deficit was 1.5 percentage points higher than in the same quarter the year earlier, despite the fact that unemployment fell below 4% in the intervening period (and thus borrowing more was just because the Trump government is embarked on increasing spending).

The USA borrowed as much in a single quarter as it did in all of 2006, towards the peak of the previous economic cycle.

That debt Graph would look very different if one incorporated EXTINGUISHED debt

Orthodox economists have traditionally been self-assured, arrogant, and idiotic about debt. “Government spending must be paid for now or later,” wrote Robert Barro, of Harvard University, in a seminal paper published in 1989. “A cut in today’s taxes must be matched by a corresponding increase in the present value of future taxes.”

“Must”? Why? How much more idiotic can one get? Governments can default on debt, and can do it soft, or hard. They can even make default look like an act of God: consider the Russian default when the Soviets took power, in 1917, leaving millions of French investors the poorer for it (yet also leaving Russia with a much improved industrial basis and better trains).

The USA also defaulted twice during the Twentieth Century (under presidents FDR and Nixon). A way to default is devaluation of the currency, another way to sneakily default is inflation.

The late 1920s bull mania was a deliberate attempt by the US Fed and the bank of England, to extinguish debt from World War One. So was the inflation of the 1930s (Paris, against it, argued with Washington, for it; the US was right, France wrong; of course Hitler inflated beyond reason, encouraged by Washington…)

Once again, a traditional, but misleading graph: it contains violently extinguished debt

Inflation is not just a way to extinguish excessive debt: I have argued that it is a way to accelerate the economy, making it more technological.

So why would a Harvard professor say such a stupid thing? Do I need to ask? Even rhetorically? Because it pleased the US plutocratic class at the time, which probably rewarded him handsomely.

Looking around history, one can see big differences between the economy of the last four decades, and the period 1935-1975. The first period was characterized by massive expansion of economy and education (in spite of the 100 million directly killed by generalized fascism). For example air travel, universal higher education and universal health care appeared and became dominant. After that, pretty much stagnation… except for the increase of inequality.

And what do we also see since the Glorious Thirties (the 1945-1975 period when Western economies saw a wealth expansion of the 90%; after that, all the growth in income went to the 1%…)? Public spending on infrastructure, educational, or industrial, collapsed, throughout the West, thanks to the Trickle-Down plutocratic ideology.  

Reciprocally, a return to massive public spending might raise the activity, hence the returns to private investment, generating more the latter. (Calling that “populism” worked for a while as an insult, but should be now backfiring… as We The People realizes that there is nothing wrong with We The People… contrarily to what the insulting elite keeps on claiming…)

Eurocrats and their masters, the Europlutocrats, brandish the scare of public debt. However, japan with a more elderly population, is roaring back thanks to Abenomics… And a 230% of GDP public debt.

Economists out France or Germany say that Japanese public debt is a terrible thing. Why? If worse came to worst, the Japanese government would have to tell those who bought Japanese debt: ’Sorry, we can’t pay you back. At all.’ What would then have happened? A tax! Like in Europe! In other words, should the Japanese government 100% default, those wealthy enough to have lend to the Japanese government would then have to pay… a tax! They would be reduced to the status of French taxpayers, horror of all horrors!

Except, of course, in France, taxes, being mostly indirect, strike the poor and the poorest of the poor… whereas a Japanese default (which will not happen) would strike the wealthy (including a few wealthy foreigners…). The same is a fortiori true for US debt.

If the US defaulted on its debt (and it will not happen), lots of wealthy foreigners may cry… Meanwhile the US economy will have roared ahead… thanks to foreign money. What will the foreigners do, if the USA default, to get even? Invade? (No, the US military, paid by aforesaid foreigners, is too strong…) Refuse to lend some more? Not necessarily: when you can’t beat up the strong, you may as well join it. That’s exactly what happened when the US defaulted… and the USA defaults all the time…

There are many ways to default: first one can default on the interest only, or part of it.

Inflation also extinguishes debt. The CPI (the inflation measurement) in the San Francisco Bay Area, the biggest tech engine of the US and world economy, reached nearly 5% last year (2017). Such a healthy dose of inflation will absorbs lots of debt. Meanwhile, among many other things, said Bay Area fabricated for more than twelve billion dollars of electric cars in 2018…. While Apple Inc. based a few miles away, generated more than 200 billions in revenue…  

So the SF Bay Area is a perfect illustration that a roaring economy goes well with roaring inflation, thus roaring debt, etc. Looking in detail within the machinery of some major tech companies (say Oracle) show lots of debt at major points of development…

When the pace of economic (GDP) growth exceeds the rate of interest on a country’s public debt, managing indebtedness is a shrinking business: debt incurred in the past shrinks steadily as a share of GDP without any new taxes needing to be levied.

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Public Debt Helps The Public In General, and the Poor First of All:

Some are sure to whine that debt might nonetheless rise if annual deficits are sufficiently gigantic, as they are in US America now. Even so, at prevailing interest rates and growth rates, and with deficits continuing at 5% of GDP, it would take more than a century for America’s ratio of gross public debt to GDP to reach the current Japanese level…. And then, as I pointed out, so what? A tax? A 2018 French-like situation? Overtaxation? No, not really: remember, only the wealthy lend. So debt will reduce inequality. Actually MASSIVE debt reduces inequality in two ways:  it potentially taxes the wealthy, in the future, and, in the meantime, it feeds countries and the poor (who are the first to profit from public infrastructure)…

Hypocrites will come, and suggest inflation hurts the poor… However, although inflation extinguishes debt, there are other ways to extinguish debt, and thus rampant debt doesn’t mean rampant inflation…

Olivier Blanchard, long chief economist of the IMF, pointed out that since 1870, the average nominal interest rate on one-year US government debt has been 4.6%, though the average annual growth rate of nominal GDP has been 5.3%. Growth rates have surpassed interest rates in every decade since 1950, except the 1980s…. And guess what happened in the 1980s? Plutocratization! (Much admired by all too many “democrats”, including Barry Obama…)

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The Rise Of Evil Power, aka, Plutocracy was tied in to debt extinction:

(Perhaps unwittingly, and hopefully witlessly) Evil US president Carter launched a secret war in Afghanistan, using Muslim Fundamentalist and the Muslim Fundamentalist ISI of Pakistan… On July 3, 1979, and immediately afterwards, Reagan, helped by the evil Democratic Congress, led by fellow Irishman Tip O’Neil, launched officially trickle-down economics: instead of making everybody wealthier through public debt, Reagan and his “democratic” little helpers claimed that, the economy would do better by making the wealthiest wealthier…

Nicholas Crafts of the University of Warwick observed that the difference between growth and interest rates did more to reduce British debt loads in the 20th century than budget surpluses. Indeed, austerity-induced deflation in the 1920s frustrated attempts to pay down war debts (that was followed by the attempt of inflating out, which was too brutal, and helped bring the 1929 crash…)

Inflating out of debt was successful after World War Two. At the same time, the uppermost margin rates were pushed by Republican president Eisenhower up to 93% (nobody has accused Eisenhower to be a socialist… yet) Similar rates applied in Britain and high taxes on the wealthy also applied in throughout Europe…

In the past decade our great leaders have listened to their future benefactors, and sponsors, the wealthiest. The wealthiest want the poor ever poorer, so that wealth, power, can be worth having, ever more. So our great leaders, who are great servants of the wealthier, have done as ordered, and have stimulated public economies too little. (To make the lowest people feel good enough about themselves, while they undermined them, they have paid them with PC speech, and “identity politics”, that is, racism…)

Result? Rich countries have spent ever more time below their productive capacity than above it—at grave economic cost: while French, German, British and US  politicians explained to We The people that they cost too much, China, India and their satellites (population three billions) roared ahead, spending on the public as needed by the public. This is how Europe, its colonies and the US did it in the Nineteenth Century (and even in centuries prior, following the dominant economic theory known as “Mercantilism”)

An overdeveloped fear of public debt, invented by plutocrats, nurtured by prostituted economists, is to blame. But now a new class of “populist” leaders have appeared, who call a lot of it, for what it is. So some government economists have been ordered to acquaint themselves with reality.

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The 3% Deficit Limit Is Killing the European Union:

And guess what? Experience suggests that governments face much looser budget constraints than once was claimed on every rooftop. So governments enjoy more freedom to support struggling economies than previously believed. Economists, happy to get orders less debasing to themselves, are taking note, that, indeed, yes, governments can borrow more…..

“Neoliberalism” is fundamentally a lie. “Neoliberalism” is a creed, a faith, and a conspiracy for the gullible. “Neoliberalism” asserts that the economy does best, when left to private enterprise. This is a lie, just there, and propaganda. Indeed it always omits a detail: how money is created.

In the “Neoliberal” creed, the (private) banks create money by lending. To whom do they lend? The wealthiest. So the wealthiest privates get more and more money, and the poor, less and less, augmenting inequality, year after year, as observed: the color of the skin of the president has nothing to do with it.

The only way to cut that vicious circle is having the Treasury create money and use said created money for public work. The Treasury can do this by creating bonds. That will spur the economy.

Should a crisis arise, a sovereign government can grab the debt and extinguish it.

In 1790, Secretary of the US Treasury Alexander Hamilton did just that: he took all the debt, from all the states, and extinguished it, by making it into Federal Debt (hint to the European Union… do the same…).

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When Not Sovereign Debt To Foreigners Means Loss of Independence: the Case of Dauphiné

The French Crown had done exactly the same extinction of debt with the state of Dauphiné in 1349 CE. Long an independent republic in the Roman empire, that region, named after an altruistic sea mammal, found itself with crushing debts in the Fourteenth Century. In exchange Dauphiné lost its independence inside the Roman Empire, becoming instead subject to the kingdom of France, “empire in its own kingdom” (don’t ask: a consequence of the Frexit of the Tenth Century; France by then had discovered that it would be better to make one with the region east of the Rhone-Saône).

Dauphiné has a very long independent history, all the way back to before Hannibal. The Dolphin was selected as a symbol of the altruism of that Alpine quasi-republic. Differently from fellow Switzerland, debt enslaved it… But France was the superpower of the time… Switzerland solved the ownership problem by fighting its owners, the Habsburg, to death…

The kingdom of France, empire onto itself had debts, of course, but when it so pleased. Otherwise, it could always send the army to visit lenders with too much of an inappropriate attitude (as the soon to be ex-Republic of Florence found out…)

Sovereignty and debts are bound together. The EU should do as the US did in 1790 CE. Meanwhile, the present European situation is not sustainable: whereas the USA can grow debt as big as it wants, and the notion of debt doesn’t even exist in China, Europe is reducing its economic activity to profit its plutocrats.  

At least US politicians are not so treacherously corrupt, that they will stoop that low. 

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Conclusion: Debt is tax deferred. Public debt for public interest works boosts the economy, in a way no private spending can replace. Indeed, private spending is motivated by profit, but serving the public is serving the public, not profiting from the public.

The “Neoliberal” creed, truly the power of evil, has insisted human beings know just one motivation: greed. But humanity, in full, know many other motivations, including that of serving public good. Servicing public good is more deeply anchored in human psychobiology, because, prehistorically speaking, the individual couldn’t exist without the collective (the tribe).

We need more public spending, thus, to not overtax the economy, more debt.  

Patrice Ayme

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Even “The Economist” has noticed. Consider: “Economists reconsider how much governments can borrow: The profession is becoming less debt-averse”

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Dauphiné lost its independence to Paris in 1349 CE… But not its Parliament. However, in 1788 CE, one year before well known events in Paris, the French Revolution started, for real, south of Grenoble in the city of Vizille, encircled by mighty mountains. A consequence of the Revolution would be the loss of regional parliaments, including that of Grenoble…

 

Weathering Reinforced Orbital Glaciation Theory

I suggested that one could absorb CO2 by deliberately watering vast hot expanses of basalt and, or calcium or magnesium bearing tropical wastelands.
Friend Ian Miller pointed out in a comment that crushing rocks to achieve this required energy. I replied that, actually, I have seen immense expanses of desert in North America, South America, Mexico, Iran, Africa with such rock in a pulverulent form: no need to crush them, they are already completely crushed.

Then I remembered the Sahara, with thousands of kilometers of such pitiless desert. The highest mountain in the Sahara, as in Iran, is a volcano… But then I also remembered seeing prehistoric paintings there, of bucolic hunting scenes complete with hippopotamuses and trees… Imagine: that’s now an absolute desert: seeing one tree is seeing a miracle (one such tree is called “l’arbre du Tibesti”; it’s many thousands years old…).. Ah, but then, when the Sahara was wet, the watering, and the weathering, were achieved! CO2 was withdrawn from the atmosphere!

The white substance is natron, well-known to the Egyptians, in a giant caldera, the Trou au Natron, at the foot of an enormous shield volcano in Chad… In the middle of the Sahara. And not the largest volcano there. The cliffs are 1,000 meters tall. Yes, this all absorbs CO2 when wet…

So I suggest this: glaciations, in the last 2.75 million years were accentuated, reinforced by CO2 absorption from chemically interacting with rocks in the desert. Indeed, during glaciations, the giant circulation cells which create the arid subtropics are less aggressive and move south: the deserts become wet and green.

Now make no mistake: I am NOT saying that the orbital glaciation theory is false. I am just correcting it. I am adding a factor. The orbital theory of glaciation says that glaciations occur when it is too cold in July-August to melt snows in the Northern Hemisphere… where the continents mostly are (the southern equivalent is mostly ice-free: it’s an ocean, the “Roaring Forties”). The theory was first suggested by French mathematicians Joseph Alphonse Adhémar (1797–1862) who computed that ice ages were controlled by astronomical forces in his 1842 book Revolutions of the Sea. The idea is now associated with Milankovitch’s name. The theory’s recent Computer simulations show that this is (roughly) correct… Although various sticky mysteries remain.

I am just suggesting that the glaciating effect found by pure orbital and Earth rotation dynamics is amplified by the mechanism of CO2 diminution from rock chemistry I just described, in this essay and the preceding one.
Indeed orbital effects come short of explaining what is observed. Simulations and paleoclimate analysis show that the variation in Earth’s climate is much more extreme than the variation in the intensity of solar radiation calculated as the Earth’s orbit evolves. Methane release and the like doesn’t cut it yet. If orbital forcing causes climate change, and it does, science needs to explain why the observed glaciation effect is amplified compared to the theoretical, purely astronomical effect.

I just did.

Patrice Ayme

How To Remove CO2 From the Atmosphere: Water Volcanic, Calcium & Magnesium Desertic Tropical Ranges. Contemplate Indonesia!

DID INDONESIA CAUSE THE LAST THREE MILLION YEARS OF GLACIATION? SOLVING THE CO2 CATASTROPHE BY ACTIVE, FEASIBLE REMOVAL:

In the last 500 million years, three-quarters of the time or so, the planet enjoyed a hot, Jurassic style climate. It was not the case during the evolution of the genus Homo, one characteristic of which is the ability to endure cold and even subpolar climate. Enormous glaciations then rolled in, one after the other. What happened? Well, the mystery has now been unveiled.

This is not just a curiosity. Indeed, said discovery provides us with a solution to the CO2 catastrophe: just water dry tropical volcanic ranges and similar areas with plenty of calcium and magnesium, and the CO2 will be removed, stabilizing the atmosphere. Watering those particular mineral areas provides with a believable mechanism to decrease CO2 when enormous amounts of cheap clean energy is available… in a generation or two. (This is the first plausible mechanism ever suggested to do so!)

***

Sacred mountain of Zoroastrianism, the major historical religion of civilization, Mount Damavand is the highest point in Iran higher than the Alps or even the Caucasus. It is an active volcano in full sight of gigantic Teheran. The gas and fumaroles on top was a problem when I circled the crater. This is the northern side, facing the Caspian sea, a lush area. Other sides are extremely dry, and I propose to water them. That of course would require gigantic, power-hungry engineering beyond the capability of present civilization.

Global climate change around 3–4 Million years ago influenced the evolution of hominids, via the aridification of Africa, and what happened next, the Pleistocene glaciation about 2.75 Myr ago… thereafter the Earth’s climate suffered rolling glaciations… while human species evolved ever faster.

Most explanations of these climatic events used to involve changes in circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean due to the closing of the Isthmus of Panama. The idea is that a strong current of warm water was going north from the Pacific, joining, and augmenting the Gulf Stream, thus preventing any ice to form in the Arctic. With no ice in the Arctic, the albedo of Earth was significantly lower, thus all these infrared, instead of being sent back to space by reflecting snows, were trapped in the Arctic. A warm Arctic brought temperatures up, overall.

However, the closure of the Indonesian seaway 3–4 Myr ago could also be responsible for these climate changes: it acts similarly to the contemporaneous Panama closing (but as we will see, Indonesia does more than Panama). Closing the Indonesian seaway brought the aridification of Eastern Africa. The simplest theory and results from ocean circulation modelling show that the displacement of mighty New Guinea, about 5 Myr ago, at 100 kilometers per million years, going north, and west, closed the seaway. (But not just that, as we will see.)

That would have switched the source of flow through Indonesia—from warm South Pacific to relatively cold North Pacific waters (all waters below 100 meters are now blocked by narrow, shallow straights inside the Indonesian archipelago). This blockage would have decreased sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, leading to reduced rainfall over Eastern Africa. Changes in the equatorial Western Pacific, by making heat stagnate there, probably reduced atmospheric heat transport from the tropics to higher latitudes, stimulating global cooling around the poles, and the eventual growth of ice sheets., which, in turn, cooled the planet further!

All of a sudden, shallow waters all over! The right side, the gigantic island of New Guinea, moved north, but also west, at 100 kilometers per million years, strangling the Indonesian seaway, starting 5 millions years ago (coincident with the same in Mesoamerica) This blocked the Earth’s warmest waters to enter the Indian ocean.

But there is another way in which Indonesia enters the climatic picture: CO2 removal by chemical reaction with basaltic rocks. This happened because the tectonic collisions caused the rise of high mountains, hence intense weathering.

***.

Basalt Make CO2 Into Rock:

Basalt generally has a composition of 45–55 % SiO2, 2–6 wt% total alkalis, 0.5–2.0% TiO2, 5–14 wt% FeO and 14% or more Al2O3. Contents of CaO are commonly near 10%, those of MgO commonly in the range 5 to 12%.

Limestone is a sedimentary rock which is often composed of the skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral, foraminifera and molluscs. Its major materials are the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate (CaCO3).

Immediate conclusion: if one adds CO2 to basalt, one should be able to make limestone. Indeed:

When CO2 is in presence of water, it reacts and makes carbonic acid. Putting lots of CO2 into water makes a Seltzer water which is acidic enough to destroy basalt. The low pH water (3.2) worked to dissolve the calcium and magnesium ions in the basalts, which then reacted with the carbon dioxide to make calcium and magnesium carbonates (which are whitish). Cores drilled into experimental sites in basalt showed rock with the tell-tale white carbonates occupying the pore spaces. Roughly it seems that 100 kilograms of basalt turned 50 kilograms of CO2 into rock. So far so good… One could locate power plants on top of basalt flows? Probably not: the process costs of the order of $17 a ton… That would augment the cost of burning oil by 20% (back of envelope computation in my head)… One has to understand the cheapest energy is already photovoltaic energy… In 2018…

Researchers tagged the CO2 they injected in basalt, 600 meters down, with carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. None of the injected CO2 was leaking back to the surface or finding its way out through a distant watercourse, as no radioactivity came out: the capture of CO2 by basalt is highly efficient.

***

Indonesia is sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere:

Many mountains in Indonesia and New Guinea consist of ancient volcanic rocks from belching volcanoes caused by subduction of various tectonic plates. When ocean floors were caught in a colossal tectonic collision between a chain of island volcanoes and a continent, those volcanic  rocks were thrust high. Lashed by warm tropical, acidic, corrosive, penetrating rains, these basaltic rocks react with CO2 sequestering the product inside the basalt. That is why, with only 2% of the world’s land area, Indonesia accounts for 10% of its long-term CO2 absorption. Its mountains could explain why massive ice sheets have persisted, waxing and waning, for several million years: evidence shows that the normal state of the planet in the last half a billion years, is a hothouse, with crocodiles all the way to the north of Greenland…

Researchers claim to have found that such tropical mountain-building collisions in wet areas coincide with nearly all of the half-dozen or so significant glacial periods in the past 500 million years. “These types of environments, through time, are what sets the global climate,” said Francis Macdonald, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. (December 2018). If Earth’s CO2 has a machine producing it, the rise of mountains like Indonesia’s could be it.

Long-term changes in the planet’s temperature are governed by shifts in CO2 atmospheric density. Plate tectonics refurbishes continually the planet’s surface. For decades, scientists have debated what turned the CO2 on, to the dramatic extent it did. Volcanoes were long prime suspects. Volcanoes erupt where plates dive beneath one another. By spewing carbon from Earth’s interior, they could turn up the thermostat. That was the idea. But it’s a bit stupid: CO2 was in atmosphere, gets captured by rocks, sediments, gets buried, and then belched out: it sounds like a rather quick (on a geological scale) zero sum game: what comes in comes right out…

Rock weathering of massive mountain ranges, seems a smarter approach: it depends on mountain building driven by plate tectonics. Indeed, sometimes there are giant mountain ranges, as big, or bigger than the present Himalayas. Sometimes, most often, not: as observed, the planet is a hot-house ¾ of the time, just as there are no massive wet tropical ranges, most of the time.

The Hercynian range, which spans the Appalachians, Scotland, and countless ranges in Europe, is still here for all to see (started 480 millions ago, it became Himalayan like when Africa collided with North America as part of the construction of Pangea).

When tropical mountains contain seafloor rocks rich in calcium and magnesium, they react with CO2 dissolved in rainwater to form limestone, which is eventually buried on the ocean floor. Both processes matter in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, This also explains why there were gigantic amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere in the Carboniferous era, and they mysteriously vanished: they are in all these rocks, such as all these limestone ranges….

Having the right rocks to drive the CO2-chewing reaction is not sufficient. Climate matters, as I said. For example, the Siberian Traps, a region that saw devastating volcanic eruptions 252 million years ago, are rich in such rocks but absorb little CO2: it’s too damn cold, the chemistry doesn’t happen much because of the cold (details aren’t clear yet).

More clearly, in Arabia, one finds plenty of heat and volcanic rocks, but the solvent, water, is absent: CO2 rains down as carbonic acid after reacting with water… But only then. So… If could make it rain in Arabia, we could eliminate massive amounts of CO2. @,lacks another ingredient. “It’s hotter than Hades but it doesn’t rain.” Indonesia’s location in the rainy tropics is just right. “That is probably what’s keeping us centered in an ice age,” Kent adds.

***

The Preceding Suggests THE Viable, Sustainable and Definitive Remedy to the CO2 catastrophe:

Lots of cockmaniacal plans have been proposed to mitigate the CO2 catastrophe (Harvard, the Pluto university, is going to try to throw a veil on the atmosphere… although that won’t solve the CO2 problem, but trust the nasty to come up with nastier…)

Some of mitigation of CO2 will happen naturally: as, and if, the Siberian Traps become tropical, and if it rains there much, CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere. More generally, as the entire planet warms, it moistens up, and all volcanic zones of the planet become CO2 absorbing: this is a natural way to prevent CO2 from raising so much the planet boils.

Practically, if one finally masters thermonuclear power, and, or, photovoltaic energy becomes super cheap, one could make it rain artificially (or massively water) dry tropical volcanic rock areas (such as Arabia, Iran). Thus one would remove enormous quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. That will have to be done by 2100, just to stabilize the climate in the standard hothouse, the Jurassic mode ( what Trump calls a “super climate”), with sea level ten meters higher and crocodiles in Newfoundland…

Over the past few years, academic Macdonald and his collaborators have searched for other times when tectonics and climate could have conspired to open an Indonesia-size CO2 sink. They found that glacial conditions 90 million and 50 million years ago lined up neatly with the collisions of a chain of island volcanoes in the now-vanished equatorial Neo-Tethys Ocean with the African and Asian continents. A similar collision some 460 million years ago started to form the Appalachians, but it was thought to have taken place in the subtropics, where a drier climate (from trade winds) does not favor weathering. By reanalyzing ancient magnetic fields in rocks formed in the collision, Macdonald’s team found the mountains actually rose deep in the tropics. And their uplift matched a 2-million-year-long glaciation. “They’re developing a pretty compelling story that this was a climate driver in Earth’s past,” says Lee Kump, a paleoclimatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Those cases are not exceptions. Indeed, the team compiled a database of every tectonic “suture”—the linear features left by tectonic collisions—known to contain ophiolites, characteristic pieces of sea floor, and pillow lavas and the like, volcanic sea floor, over the past half-billion years. Based on magnetism in each suture’s rocks and a model of continental drift, they mapped their ancient latitudes to see which formed in the warm and rainy tropics, and when. “We were surprised that this is not as complicated as we thought,” Macdonald said.

The team compared the results to records of past glaciations and found a strong correlation. They also looked for declines in volcanism, which might have cooled the climate (from lessening of CO2 emissions). But their influence was much weaker, Macdonald said.

A recent study challenges the mountain CO2 weathering-thermostat notion with evidence for the importance of volcanoes (as I said, it has to be rather a zero sum, when considering volcanoes from subduction, because what goes in comes pretty fast out!) The study used ages from thousands of zircons, durable crystals that can indicate volcanic activity, to show that upticks in volcanic emissions were the dominant force driving the planet’s warm periods. But there are two types of volcanisms: what I call “core volcanism” (“Traps”, Large Igneous Provinces, LIPs) brings in massive amounts of fresh CO2 from way down inside the mantle… It’s likely both streams of ideas have at least one hand on the truth.

The beauty of absorption by volcanic rocks of CO2 is that it explains not just why glaciations start, but also why they stop.

A hothouse Earth appears to be the planet’s default state, prevailing for three-fourths of the past 500 million years. We will have it again by 2100: the dice are thrown, it’s in the air.

An Indonesia-style collision may push the global climate into a glacial period, but only for a while. Mountains erode and continents drift. And the planet warms again.

Science doesn’t just bring understanding, it brings also the means to act on the universe. Now we have the trick to reduce CO2… (And I am, by the way, the first to propose it: massive watering of the desiccated zones!) To give us the means, we have to keep on deploying photovoltaic energy and thermonuclear reactors (I say “deploying”, because there is plenty of evidence that a massive thermonuclear reactor could work: the bigger, the more efficient, it’s a matter of mass against surface).

The alternative to the solution to the CO2 catastrophe by weathering and geological chemistry is a CO2 driven holocaust. Developing science and technology is not just profitable, pleasant, and human. It is also the moral thing to do. And the only moral solution to CO2 there is.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

P/S: By public request, a partial list of references supporting the research above:

References: Closing of the Indonesian seaway as a precursor to east African aridification around 3–4 million years ago
Mark A. Cane & Peter Molnar
Nature volume 411, pages 157–162 (10 May 2001)

Swanson-Hysell, N.L. and Macdonald, F.A., 2017. Tropical weathering of the Taconic orogeny as a driver for Ordovician cooling, Geology, G38985. 1.

(That was 440 million years ago, and the continents looked nothing like now; only Siberia is recognizable… It was a free floating continent…)

Tropical uplift may set Earth’s thermostat
Paul Voosen
Science 04 Jan 2019:

For scary, or when Antarctica partially melted under similar conditions to what we are going to get within a decade:

Antarctic ice melt 125,000 years ago offers warning
Paul Voosen
Science 21 Dec 2018:

 

EMOTION PLANS LOGIC. Want No More Fakery? Tell the Truth! Hurt the Feelings of Fakers!

Emotional logic builds geometrical logic. This is a neurological fact. And yes, there are alternative facts, all over, because there are incomplete logics, logics with incomplete universes, all over. Any logic depends upon a universe of facts. Not all universes of facts are complete, far from it. It happens even in physics. Somehow, much vaunted modern physics is missing 95% of the mass-energy: it has no idea whatsoever what Dark Energy and Dark Matter could be made of: a case where major facts are still missing… in the most fundamental science. Or is it? What could be more fundamental than neurology?

Philosophy , once it knows enough science, realizes that, although we don’t know all the details yet, clearly the topology of various substances bathing the brain, with their many dimensions, are what direct neuronal geometry… This, in particular explains why one cannot fight emotions with facts readily. That is like changing grass in the steppe with scissors.

If a child makes a mistake, one doesn’t respect the “alternative”, false computation. Instead, one says, pedagogically, that the computation is not correct. Children listen, because they respect teachers and parents (or used to…) So the emotional logic of respect, makes school possible.

Paradoxically, the problem then, maybe that one uses too much rationality to try to bend rationality, confronted to adults who have the wrong emotional logic.

When I say that “emotions plan reason”, I allude to the fact that the emotional system is actually a topological computer. Topological structures can actually be more stable than geometric structures: that Descartes guessed, and Lord Kelvin elaborated further (in an attempt to make particles out of ether vortices… something which will one day resurface… Thanks to pilot wave theory…)

Faced by a lethal religious fanatic, or a climate change denier (for example), the best method may not be to present them with facts and logics they can’t understand, or are unwilling to consider. Instead, one should probably appeal to their emotional logic.

How? One way is to call a cat a cat. Confronted to idiocy, it may be more pedagogical to say it as it is: idiotic. Instead, “Multiculturalism” (and Latour was part of it) insisted that complete idiocy and primitivism, were valuable alternate realities. Now Latour says there is just one reality. Right. However the philosophy known as “French Theory” said the opposite for 60 years….

Want no more fakery? Tell the truth! Hurt the feelings of fakers!

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Note 0: I have addressed this subject many times before:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/12/29/emotion-primes-reason/

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/emotions-prime-reason-ii/

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/hormones-rule-reason/

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/1914-imprinting-emotions-rule-iii/

Note 1: The preceding, that emotional machinery is the architect of the geometric logic, explains the observation of John Stuart Mill that ideas don’t work to change systems of mind readily (Discoverer of the Quantum Max Planck said the same a bit later, pointing out that physics progresses one funeral at a time, or something to this effect). Anyway here is Mill: in the Subjection of Women (1869; following an essay by a female feminist in 1851)

“The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my conviction rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply-rooted of all those which gather round and protect old institutions and customs, that we need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress of the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms than those which they earlier shake off.”

***

Note 2: The preceding short essay was a comment sent to, and published by, the New York Times regarding “Why Fighting Fake News With the Facts Might Not Be Enough” by Jennifer Szalai. I give an extensive quote below, not because she is such a genius… but because the context she provides unwittingly is telling… Latour, by the way, is from a top plutocratic wine family, wealthy for generations… So his (not really “his”, just the latest parroting) declaration that massive uncontrolled immigration to the Europe is justified, just as a tsunami is justified, because waves come and go, and come back again… is a red herring… Something to look at… while doesn’t look at how Latour and his class became wealthy, the old fashion way, inheriting it…
Jan. 9, 2019

“Alternative facts”: The term manages to be tedious, ridiculous and perilous at once — a real sign of the times. For anyone who doesn’t remember, Kellyanne Conway introduced it in early 2017… serenely chiding an exasperated Chuck Todd for being “overly dramatic” as he repeatedly tried to get her to concede that lying to the American public was bad.

Her phrasing may have been new, but Conway was taking part in what has apparently become a conservative tradition — performing a skepticism so extreme that it makes the ancient Greek skeptics look like babes in the woods. Recall a high-ranking aide in the Bush administration needling a journalist for belonging to “the reality-based community.” A respect for facts, the aide suggested, was ultimately for suckers: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

You might think this kind of postmodernism would appeal to the French anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, who has spent a career studying how knowledge is socially constructed. You would be wrong. Such pretensions to reality-creating grandeur, Latour suggests, amount to little more than a vulgar, self-defeating cynicism.

In “Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime,” Latour argues that climate change is forcing all of us to confront truths that seem hard to reconcile but turn out to be two sides of the same thing: 1) reality exists, whether we like it or not; and 2) our attempts to apprehend it are contingent on our social context. Along with Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall’s “The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread,” Latour’s new book offers a way to think through the seemingly insurmountable impasse carved out by political polarization and fake news.

Latour calls for an entirely new way of understanding the world. He says he wrote “Down to Earth” with a “deliberate bluntness.” He vests a surprising hope in Europe, whose colonial past — or “crimes,” as he puts it — he depicts as inextricable from the migrations it tries to keep out. “Europe has invaded all peoples; all peoples are coming to Europe in their turn,” he writes. “Give and take. There is no way out of this.”

Latour also describes migration as the human embodiment of our “new climatic regime.” Under the old way of thinking, exploited peoples and places were ignored, silenced and stripped of agency; now migrants and the earth itself are both setting out “to recover what belongs to them.”

No doubt some readers will find this to be too much, too philosophical and too French. But maybe it takes a brilliantly mind-bending book like Latour’s to show that so much reality can’t be denied.

Truth Makes No Sense. Sense We Make. As Love We Do!

The truth doesn’t make sense. Truth doesn’t have to make sense. Because WE, humans, not truth, make all the sense there is, and all the senses, there are in the world. Giving senses to truth is what WE do.

Truth doesn’t have to make sense, but we need to make sense… to survive. Truth is eternal, its survival not a problem, and truth doesn’t need to remember stuff. Truth just is, it is what is. Another word for truth is reality. We don’t know all there is, neither does truth, because truth doesn’t know anything. Truth is what is. Truth is not what proffers meaning. That we do.

Then the question naturally arises: what is meaning? What does meaning mean? (One is condemned to read until the end of this essay to find out!)

We, on the other hand, need to well-order reality (in the mathematical sense) to create causality chains, little stories in our minds we can act upon, reflecting what is… Pieces of truth, enough of them, we need, in order to survive.

Making Sense is our Prerogative. And only ours.

A simple truth about humanity is that it needs faith… to think. That explains much, excuses a lot, while complicating everything. Yet it doesn’t mean anything goes.

Exposed to this truth, many a scientist or rationalist, of the shallow persuasion, will scoff. They are wrong. They use faith everyday, and especially them.

Thus the great mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck once discovered that the (French) military secretly financed his own Institut des hautes études scientifiques (IHÉS) . Grothendieck was fiercely, and loudly, anti-militaristic. Grothendieck had founded IHÉS (with Dieudonne, another French mathematician). Being militarily funded violated what Grothendieck called “one of his axioms”. So Grothendieck resigned and gave up math, at the grand old age of 42.

Grothendieck’s “axioms” were his faith: he had faith in his axioms. All and any axiomatic system is a system of faith. Axioms can be ridiculous, like the Axiom of Parallels (known to be false in spherical geometry, which Pytheas of Marseilles had used, contemporaneously with Euclid…)  

Truth makes no sense, but we have to make sense, and not just on the blackboard! Grothendieck, 1960s… IHES…

Grothendieck was very clever with his mathematics, much of it related to Category Theory applied to Algebraic Geometry. He didn’t realize that it was the military which had saved him from extermination in 1944, by killing the Nazis. In his memoirs, hiding in the French woods, as an ex-German Jew, and child, he didn’t realize that his life was at the most extreme risk…. He said this himself in his memoirs. But shouldn’t have he realized, when reflecting on his lack of reflection then, that the military, in particular the French military and the FFI (Forces Francaises de l’Interieur) saved his life?

Shouldn’t Grothendieck have been grateful? Just 30 years earlier, the French military had been defeated by the Nazis and forced, by traitors to accept a ceasefire, leading to the Holocaust of the Jews (if the French military had kept on fighting, from the Mediterranean, the Wehrmacht would have been unable to attack the Soviet Union, and thus to massacre all the millions of Eastern European Jews it did massacre, with the help of the SS and other PhD endowed nuts…)

Here we confront a problem with scientists: they love to pose against the grain, spurning truth. It’s not just the likes of John Lennon who do. Lennon’s loud screaming for peace, was coincident with similar poses from the likes of Bertrand Russell, and company. Some will point out it was the time of the Vietnam War. Right. However, whatever it was, the Vietnam War was no holocaust, nor genocide. Right, it was no good. But still, no genocide. Meanwhile genocides were conducted in Canada and Australia, very discreetly, against the Aborigines. They could be conducted, those genocides, because they were, and are, discrete.

All those protesters protesting against something else, not so clearly significant, as if it were the end of the world, contributed, by raising loud red herrings, to make those genocides safe (for the whites to conduct) and effective (by separating children and parents, ravaged, acculturated adults were sure to come about, and further disappear the aboriginal population in crucial parts of the Anglosphere, through all sorts of depressions, abuse and drug addictions….

Truth is what made us. Made us as a society, a civilization, a species, an ethics, a psychobiology, a force that goes, a will, a hope, an arrow of time… Denying truth is denying our creator.

Patrice Ayme

 

Ignore Moods, Ignore Minds.

ONE CAN IGNORE MOODS, BUT THEY RULE MINDS.

It seems to me that some of Wittgenstein’s views on religion boil down to him trying to say: There is an emotional logic which accompanies “religion”, but it doesn’t reduce to geometric logic. (Compare with Pascal, three centuries earlier: “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison n’a point”… Heart has its reasons, that reason does not have.)

One has to talk precisely, and with discernment: religious beliefs come in two different types: secular and superstitious.

Football is a religion for its fanatics, so is patriotism (doing like one’s fathers), so is the Republic (consider Republican Rome and the heroes who gave their lives for it)… Then there are beliefs like monarchism, or Confucianism, nearly a superstition. Then there are outright superstitions. Superstitions believe extraordinary things, which, as their label denotes, stand above (reality), like blind love for the god who wants to kill children, or the prophet who flew on a winged horse to Jerusalem, or the hummingbird god, etc.

So one should distinguish between superstition based religions and religions based on tying up together again (re-ligare)… without any superstitious element… call the latter secular religions.  

There is a huge difference, an unfathomable abyss, between superstitious religions and secular religions. The latter has a reference: the genus Homo. The former, superstition, refer to the inhuman: god. Superstition based religion asks to believe, all the same, in something unbelievable: it asks to commit to a faith in… irrationality. Once one has left irrationality at the door, one has committed the greatest fraud and sacrifice against human nature. Then everything else is permitted, such as killing the innocents. It’s no accident: that was the aim. Consider the Tangut empire, a Buddhist empire (destroyed by Genghis Khan). There the slightest fault was punished by death.

This is the main interest of superstitious religions for potentates: teaching the subjects to leave reason at the door, robbing them of their free will. In the Tangut empire, the top dogs had the right to have sex with all and any brides (Genghis Khan didn’t like that).

Wittgenstein seems to have suggested that logical expression in different groups can be connected to different emotions. For example “God is Great” means “the universe is great” for the followers of the Abrahamist cults. Indeed.

But Abrahamist emotions at their peak were much stronger and nefarious: when in full control, the Abrahamist cults killed dozens of millions or more, burned libraries, 99.9% of books, eradicated most science, terrorized populations and thinkers for many centuries, throwing civilization off its tracks.

For example in the Thirteenth Century 4 to 5 millions Cathars  got exterminated by the Papacy, in several countries, down to the last person. And all their books. The reason to mention the Cathars is that they were hyper pacifist, to the point of vegetarianism (some of them ate fish, though…) Cathars rejected all wealth and materialism. There were Cathars all the way to Constantinople, where the faith got established long before it was in France. There were female Cathar bishops (“parfaites”). Many were tortured, burned alive by the sexist Catholic male chauvinist pigs. (Cathars were “Christians”… but not Catholic, thus exterminable according to Roman emperor Theodosius’ decrees of 380 CE…)

Cathar Parfaite (a Cathar bishop) flogged prior to being burned alive. Thirteenth Century Catholic amusement. Catholics, who detested women from the start, hated the gender equality of the Cathars. The Cathar ,

The holocaust of the gentle Cathars by Catholicism illustrates perfectly the insane cruelty and power obsession of the Catholic sect.

So the Abrahamists  don’t just mean “the universe is great”, when they say “god is great“. They mean: “I have decided that my god is so great He gave me a reason to kill you, if you don’t submit to me”. One can see this logical emotion at work in Arabia and the Middle East, to this day. One saw this logical emotion at work in the Americas.

One of the conquistadores ordered the massacre of the nation west of the Aztecs, which was at always been at peace with Spain. He thoroughly explained his cynical usage of religion. He said, his true aim was not at all to impose “Christ”, but not to leave a free, strong, fully armed, technologically advanced, smart Native American state in Mexico. Religion was just a pretext, he shrugged, when he wrote his justifications in his old age.

Believing in nonsensical stuff fabricates neurohormones and a way to use the brain in common: it fabricates inhuman robots all programmed the same, subscribing to the defense of the organization (the “faith”).

“Jesus rose from the grave” is not just fake news, it is a way to have similarly twisted brains in common. It is goose stepping in a common robotization of the mind, the most basic way to build a human community. It can be efficient. Hence the Catholic Church is the world’s oldest institution.

What Wittgenstein may have tried to say, is that there is emotional logic, and humanity crucially depends on it. Logic is not just all about the games languages play.

The evidence is strong: axons are the wormholes of the brain, carrying information far away and speedily. They incarnate geometrical logic. However they are built from neurohormonal topology… the emotional logic! The emotions, the moods!

One can ignore moods, but they rule minds.

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: the preceding was a comment on a murky essay in Aeon: “Wittgenstein and religion In the case atheists vs religious belief, Ludwig Wittgenstein is called to the stand. Whose side does his testimony serve?” The title says it all: Wittgenstein was full of mumbo-jumbo. However, his family was one of the top plutocratic families in Austria-Hungary, so he was like god to English plutocrats, Bertrand Russell and his ilk. And, generally, in the plutophile Anglosphere, Wittgenstein and his rocky wit still has divine status….

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Note 2: The essay made a big deal of an old Christian quandary: trying to deny the existence of god by pointing at evil is only a problem if one believes that “god” is a good god. But assuredly, the god of the old testament is worse than the worst human tyrants, so it’s both devil and the good lord. Building on this, Islam postulates that Satan and Jinns exist… apparently independently of Allah. In the Qur’an, Allah is asked why, and He replies: mind your own business, understanding this is beyond you, humans.

MAAT, TRUTH, Our Definition, By Egypt For Millennia Incarnated

Civilization Is Mostly from Greco-Romano-Frankish origins (Not mostly “Judeo-Christian”)… Today, let’s concentrate on our Egyptian ancestors:

Our world civilization is not “Judeo-Christian” (Christianism was a creation and subset of degenerating Rome)… We profited from a tremendous inheritance elaborated by Ancient Egypt, in roughly all realms of knowledge and wisdom. Egypt crucially contributed to morality, law, basic fables, mathematics, astronomy and the invention of the alphabet, in a society (mostly) without slaves, which feels surprising modern. Egyptian engineers, not content with aligning the pyramids perfectly, even realized the first usage of steam power (to open temple doors…)

Why was Ancient Egypt so intelligent? Because Egypt was anti-sexist: women had equal rights, even 5,000 years ago. Many women ended up ruling Egypt (including the revolutionary Nefertiti). Having women equal more than doubles the mental power of a civilization and balances it neurohormonally (so it’s not just crazy one way; there is evidence women were in power in Egypt especially when the going was the toughest; the same can be observed in the history of France).

Anti-sexism doesn’t just double the mental power, by having twice more brains, it does much more than that: intelligent, responsible, empowered women bring up more clever, inquisitive, balanced and moral children. Whereas a sexist society is not just run by half wits, the latter spend much time, effort and mental energy keeping the women in all sorts of unnatural bondage. 

Maat, wearing, as the Pharaohs most often did, the Feather of Truth. She used it to weigh hearts. Maat found virtuous hearts to be lighter than the feather, and send to heavens. To the Egyptian mind, Maat bound all things together in an indestructible unity: the cosmos, the natural world, the state, and the individuals were all seen as parts of the universal order generated by Maat.

The influence of Egypt on, and intellectual exchanges with, Mesopotamia, including Sumerian cities, and the Indus civilization, and the symbiosis of Egypt with the equally non-sexist thalassocratic Cretan civilization made Egypt the core of the advancement of civilization, for millennia.   

Under successive invasions from especially the savage Achaemenid Persians (525 BCE), Egypt lost its female leadership (cruelly exterminated by the sexist Persians). When Egypt was freed by Athenians and then Greco-Macedonians a non-sexist society was not re-established, because the Greeks were too much lost in war to see the interest of being ruled by women. Instead, the Greeks progressively robbed Egyptian women of their rights. In the end, Cleopatra VII made a tremendous effort to save Egypt. She was the last of many female pharaohs… And she could have succeeded, had she been even smarter than she already was. Christian and, three centuries later, Muslim fanatics, erased all traces of ancient Egypt, replacing truth by the jealous, cruel, chaotic Bible god.

To the contrary, the fundamental divinity of Egypt was the goddess of truth. Maat denotes the Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Maat is also the goddess who personified these concepts. The sun-god Ra came from the primaeval mound of creation only after he set his daughter Maat (truth) in place of Isfet (chaos). Pharaohs inherited the duty to ensure Maat (truth, rationality) remained in place and they with Ra are said to “live on Maat” (live on truth). Akhenaten and Nefertiti were accused to carry the concept too far.

Ma’at is good and its worth is lasting.

It has not been disturbed since the day of its creator,

whereas he who transgresses its ordinances is punished.

It lies as a path in front even of him who knows nothing.

Wrongdoing has never yet brought its venture to port.

It is true that evil may gain wealth but the strength of truth is that it lasts;

[from the Maxims of Ptahhotep, 45 centuries ago!]

(Much later, as sexism gained, Maat was paired with the masculine Thoth…)

We must now honor our cultural ancestors, the Egyptians. Not just because they deserve it, not just because they created us the way we think, but because we need to understand where we come from, how natural it was, and which mistakes we made more recently.  

Honoring and understanding Ancient Egypt is a question of revering what defines humanity, our search for truth. Maat.

Patrice Ayme

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Note: this was an expanded version of a comment of mine on The Radical Philosophy of Egypt: Forget God and Family, Write!

APA December 17, 2018 by Dag Herbjørnsrud

New research indicates that Plato and Aristotle were right: Philosophy and the term “love of wisdom” hail from Egypt.

A remarkable example of classical Egyptian philosophy is found in a 3,200-year-old text named “The Immortality of Writers.” This skeptical, rationalistic, and revolutionary manuscript was discovered during excavations in the 1920s, in the ancient scribal village of Deir El-Medina, across the Nile from Luxor, some 400 miles up the river from Cairo. Fittingly, this intellectual village was originally known as Set Maat: “Place of Truth.”

The paper containing the twenty horizontal lines of “The Immortality of Writers” is divided into sections by rubrication, etc.

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Here is Irsesh, the merrekh, the Egyptian philosopher:

Man perishes; his corpse turns to dust; all his relatives return to the earth. But writings make him remembered in the mouth of the reader. A book is more effective than a well-built house or a tomb-chapel, better than an established villa or a stela in the temple!

Their gates and mansions have been destroyed, their mortuary priests are gone, their tombstones are covered with dirt, their tombs are forgotten. But their names are proclaimed on account of their books which they composed while they were alive. The memory of their authors is good: it is for eternity and for ever.

Follow your heart as long as you live! … Heap up your joys, Let your heart not sink! Follow your heart and your happiness. Do your things on earth as your heart commands!

Be a writer, take it to heart, so that your name will fare likewise. A book is more effective than a carved tombstone or a permanent sepulchre. They serve as chapels and mausolea in the mind of him who proclaims their names.

Is there one here like Hordedef? Is there another like Imhotep? None of our kin is like Neferti or Khety, their leader. May I remind you about Ptahemdjehuty and Khakheperraseneb! Is there another like Ptahhotep, or the equal of Kairsu?

As one-who-loves-knowledge mer-rekh, a philo-sopher, Irsesh concludes his immortal text, thus:

Those wise writers who foretold what was to come: what they said came into being; it is found as a maxim, written in their books. Others’ offspring will be their heirs, as if they were their own children. They hid their powers from the world, but it is read in their teachings. They are gone, their names forgotten; but writings cause them to be remembered.

And I will say more: even after the writings are gone, the ideas stay, and, should those vanish in turn, moods will perdure. Our Egyptian moods perdure.