European Union Should Extent Brexit (Article 50) Two Years. Without UK European Parliament Privileges!

Indeed, as I will explain more below, the European Parliament doesn’t create laws, just approve them. Great Britain is already out ot the European Council (which launches laws).

The House of Commons, the UK Parliament, rejected the UK government’s “Withdrawal Agreement from the European Union“, for the third time. According to the EU’s ultimatum to Great Britain, the UK will be thrown out of the EU on April 12, in 14 days. This expulsion is unwise, and no civilized way to proceed. I will thereafter suggest a different course: extending massively Article 50, putting Brexit on the European backburner, a slow simmer in the background, leaving time for Great Britain to figure out its existential issues, its Brexistential issues… Shile Europe is allowed to reconsider the future, the planet, civilization, progress, democracy, and other things which have disappeared from the Brexit debate…

The interminable Brexit process is paralyzing Europe (both UK and EU). The temptation is to expedite it, in the hope of being done with it. That will not work: instead, it will make the situation way worse. If Brexit happened on April 12, 2019, in two weeks, ten years of divisive negotiations would ensue. How to avoid that? Forget about it! Forget about Brexit, send it to the purgatory of the House of Commons, under the good care of its weaker, the excellent right honorable gentleman, Speaker John Bercow.

Another new NO, the ninth, was added on Friday. The Third No on the withdrawal agreement.

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How And Why LEGALLY EXCLUDE the UK From The EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT (Until the UK Decides to Revoke Article 50, & Remain In the EU):

Europeans have to let the British Parliament find a solution and have it ratified by the British People, in a referendum. That will take at least a year. Meanwhile, the rest of the European Union has to protect itself from the pathology known as Brexit. That means that Great Britain should be EXCLUDED from taking part in the next European Parliament.

I don’t care what the legalistically minded come up with, mumbling that EU member nations have to be represented in Parliament, that we can’t have a precedent, bla bla bla. Right, the EU is very legally minded, a French characteristic, now permeating the EU. However, sticking to the law causes rigidities which, in turn can only be removed by those periodic revolutions shaking France.

The spirit of the law always beats the letter of the law. The letter of the law has already been broken: Article 50 extended only until tomorrow, March 29, 2019, the appartenunce of the UK in the EU.  Hence the letter of the law (24 months!) has been broken. Yet the spirit survives.

So, in a way, the UK is (sort of) out: the European Council, after one meeting with UK PM Cameron, four days after the fateful Brexit, never met as 28 members again: the UK got excluded. So the new spirit of the law is that the UK is partly out of the EU. The European Council is really the government of the EU (the European Commission just implements what the EC wants).

The European Council is more important than the European Parliament (European Parliament vote laws, but doesn’t suggest them). So, no EU Parliament for the UK. Instead UK in an indefinite Article 50: all rights and duties of membership, except for voting. In many democracies, convicts don’t vote for a while. Hey, Britain self-convicted.

The solution above, extending Article 50 by two years, but no Parliament for the UK, will free the EU from Brexit. The EU will be free to progress, pass laws mitigating plutocracy, climate change, foster research, education, etc. In particular financing of UK science and advanced tech by EU budgets will proceed. Also Eurosceptics will be informed that leaving the EU, and activating Article 50, has a democratic cost, and gives a forerun of what it means to be out of the EU: no more European legislating possible.  

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And what will happen to Great Britain? Polls show the UK would vote for Remain at this point. Within two years, the British People will come to its senses, in spite of the shrill shrieking propaganda of its plutocratic media (the EU should pass laws to limit plutocratic propaganda). So We the British People will vote to stay in the EU. Then a special EU Parliament UK election can be held.

The non-participation of the UK in the EU Parliament will prevent Parliamentary sabotage, which would otherwise paralyze Europe some more. However, if legal minds of the stupid kind insist on having that… the fact is that Article 50 should be extended 2 years, while Speaker Bercow and the House of Commons figure Brexit out.

Why? No bad feelings, looking forward… In the end no Brexit.

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Enough, children, who go by the self-glorifying name of “leaders”! Learn from history!

The British Parliament voted No No No No No No No No, No, on all the possibilities of Brexit, a wide spectrum selected by the very interesting Speaker Bercow. A European ultimatum expires April 12. On that date, Great Britain is supposed to have decided to leave, and how. (If if with a deal then the effective day will be in May.)

You may not know this, you children who are called leaders, because you studied just what was Politically Correct, but war is a serious thing, and a seriously sneaky thing. Apparently innocuous indifference and turning-away can turn into alienation, and war. The personal history of my family has helped me know these emotional truths. I was graced by a family which harbred resistance fighters, more than 100 Jews, which was chased by the Gestapo, while my dad arrived in France in combat, fighting Nazis… In my lifetime, I have known what it feels like to be bombed by fascist racists, and to have a young uncle who was an elder brother to me, killed by Islamist  terrorists (crucially helped by a double dealing French government).

Also I spent decades studying history, in particular of the European kind. It is not as simplistic as usually depicted. The first battle of Fontenoy (around 50,000 killed by arrows, lances, swords, and axes, in a few hours of hand to hand combat) was an enormous butchery, Franks against Franks. There was a second, even more famous battle, in the same place of Fontenoy, 1,000 years, a millennium, later, this time English against French. As one can see, French military history is rich, unparalleled… These two battles of Fontenoy were pretty much brothers against brothers, not civilization against savagery, and should never have happened.

Yes, Europe had plenty of civilization against savagery battles. France was involved in all of them (the Mongols gave up their conquest of Europe, when the top Mongol generals argued that the heavy losses they had suffered in Hungary were a foretaste of suffering again the same fate as their ancestors the Huns in France). In the Eight Century, the Franks repelled three invasions of Europe by the savage Arab Islamists, over a period of thirty years. Of course, Islam would never have happened if Catholic fascism had been defeated at the Battle of the Cold River, three centuries before Muhammad’s birth.  At the Cold River, the Western Emperor, Eugenius, a secular professor promoted by the head of the Occidental Roman army, Arbogast, confronted the catholic bigot, Oriental emperor Theodosius (originally a Spaniard). Arbogast, a Frank, controlled, for many years, a Roman army full of Romanized Franks. Theodosius was allied with the Goths. Theodosius and his goons had invented the notion of “heresy”, and laws, decrees, making “heresy” punishable at the pleasure of the government.

There is a direct line between this, and the government of Brunei establishing the death penalty for homosexuality in 2019, according to Sharia. Indeed, at the Cold River, the Frigidus river, unexpectedly, Arbogast was defeated and those who wanted heresy to be punishable by death, and Catholicism to pursue its reign of terror, won. Not only that, but, left without an army, the Occidental Roman empire promptly fell to the invading barbarian hordes, 14 years later (406 CE).

The millennium of European wars started when the French of West Francia turned their backs on the rest of the “Roman” empire (actually the west of present France, the most occidental third of the “Francia” of the Franks from 500 CE to 950 CE, including Paris had very good reasons to reject the empire… which had failed to protect them against the Viking; instead the count of Paris, soon to be duke, did the work, battling back from the ramparts, with 200 men, 10,000 bloody Vikings… while the Roman/Carolingian emperors prefered negotiations with the Viking). That turning of all French backs was, to some extent, justified. However it caused alienation between Europeans. By 1200, all of Europe was united against the French-Paris monarchy (and lost the battle and war against the “French” king Philippe Auguste, at Bouvines).

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Treat The British Well, They Don’t Have To Be Too Punished, This Is Not Versailles:

The interminable Brexit is paralyzing Europe. The temptation is to expedite it. That would be a mistake for the British: once they inspect the situation in all details, they will come to the conclusion, except for a few vested interests, like plutocrats and media moguls, and the odd deluded fisher, that staying in the EU is the less bad of all bad possibilities.

I am of the opinion that Germany was treated very well by the Versailles Treaty (contrarily to common opinion). That’s because I studied the situation in details, and I didn’t buy the Nazi opinion about Versailles. However, there is definitively a risk of mistreating a deluded Britain about Brexit. OK, the British have the wrong mentality about the European Union. This is a particular bad case of “fake news”. Just like Islamophilia is a particularly bad case of “fake news”.

So yes, there is “fake news” problem. But does that mean that British or Muslims should be mistreated? As individuals? No. The problem is that Brexit would hurt most british and European citizens, So the rest of the European Union has to be patient.

Not having the UK NOT sit in the EU Parliament will have the advantage that a lot of laws of the pro-plutocratic, anti-federal, and unequal laws, in particular the monstrous British rebate, and the even more monstrous Swiss rebate, can be legislated out.

Yes, president Macron is understandably viewing this Brexit tragicomedy as something to flush down the toilet, ASAP. However, apparently innocuous and inconsequential acts in history have resulted in immense tragedies.

Don’t forget the present system in Britain was mostly created by a succession of French adventurers, warriors, magnates and plutocrats, with a few queens and duchesses in the mix (William of Normandy, the barons of Magna Carta, Eleanor d’Aquitaine, Yolande of Aragon, Isabelle de France, Edouard III/Edward III, Lancaster/Lancastre, de Montfort come to mind; the House of Normandy was succeeded by the House of Anjou). The estrangement between England and France was the fruit of personalities more than anything else. A striking example is Yolande of Aragon, who financed Joan of Arc’s army and the illegal kinglet (the “Dolphin”) connected to them, who got the “100 Years War” relaunched all by themselves. (Yes, now there is a lamentable cult of Joan of Arc amplifying that idiotic nationalism and bigotry.)

Small things can have big consequences: models supposedly show weather systems can be created by a butterfly flapping its wings, three weeks earlier.

Macron, the French president, doesn’t want to become that butterfly of doom, flapping Europe into division and thus oblivion. Macron doesn’t want to flap all wrong. Let Macron beat on French Yellow Jackets, if that’s his won, he does that well, the French love to be beaten up, so they can beat back. Revolutions make French law progress. But Macron shouldn’t beat on the British. That could lead to war.  

The European Union will be optimal if it acts as an empire of the highest aspirations. That includes, first of all, bending over backwards not to mistreat European Peoples or nations. Europe should focus its energy on thermonuclear fusion and the space race now engaged between the USA, China, India, maybe Russia to be first (back) on the Moon. (The European thermonuclear reactor JET is based in the UK, it’s crucial to ITER, and its financing has been compromised by Brexit.)

Oh, by the way, Boris Johnson, ex-mayor of London and co-leader of the Leave (the EU) campaign, voted for the EU Withdrawal Agreement of May, today (his colleague had adopted the same position a week ago). Why? Because for the UK to leave the EU without a deal is an unfathomable catastrophe.

So, question, if the Leave campaign leaders can be that reasonable, surely the European leaders should be? Or are the leaders of the European Council truly that childish that they risk European strategic disaster, medium term? Jut on the basis of legalistically justified resentment? 

Taking away Parliament from a EU country which has left the European Council, which originates European laws, only makes sense. Beating the Brits when they are down doesn’t. Give Great Britain time to rethink Europe. Two years. No Parliament.

Patrice Ayme

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The opinion of the British on Brexit has already changed a bit. It will change some more. Hey, even the New York Times is realizing it had Trump Derangement Syndrome. Here is a New York Times editorial on Trump today:, operating a U-turn on its opinion of Trump:

Opinion

“Maybe the president brilliantly played the media. Or maybe we just played ourselves.

By Bret Stephens,  Opinion Columnist

“Maybe we’ve had this all wrong.

Maybe Donald Trump isn’t just some two-bit con artist who lucked his way into the White House thanks to an overconfident opponent. Or a second-rate demagogue with a rat-like instinct for arousing his base’s baser emotions and his enemies’ knee-jerk reactions. Or a dimwit mistaken for an oracle, like some malignant version of Chauncey Gardiner from “Being There.”

Thanks to Robert Mueller, we know he isn’t Russia’s man inside, awaiting coded instruction from his handler in the Kremlin.

Maybe, in fact, Trump is the genius he claims to be, possessed — as he likes to boast — of a “very good brain.”

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Here is the full statement from the European commissionfollowing the vote in the Commons.

The commission regrets the negative vote in the House of Commons today. As per the European council (article 50) decision on 22 March, the period provided for in article 50(3) is extended to 12 April. It will be for the UK to indicate the way forward before that date, for consideration by the European council.

A “no-deal” scenario on 12 April is now a likely scenario. The EU has been preparing for this since December 2017 and is now fully prepared for a “no-deal” scenario at midnight on 12 April. The EU will remain united. The benefits of the withdrawal agreement, including a transition period, will in no circumstances be replicated in a “no-deal” scenario. Sectoral mini-deals are not an option.

The final two sentences refer to a claim often made by Brexiters at Westminster that, in the event of a no-deal departure, the UK and the EU would in practice negotiate a series of mini-agreements to mitigate the worst consequences. This is sometimes referred to as a managed no deal.

Thermonuclear Fusion As A Moral Imperative To Avoid Ultimate Climate Catastrophe

90% of energy comes from burning fossil fuels. We have a climate crisis without precedent in 66 million years. True, Earth had bigger climate changes than what we have seen so far. So far, we have seen one degree Celsius, worldwide, but five degrees are around the corner.

True, at the warmest, something like 50 million years ago, overall planet temperature may have been 5 degrees Celsius higher. And true, when the climate oscillated furiously in the last 2.6 million years, sometimes it was 5 degrees Celsius colder than now, during the “Glacial Maxima”, or even one degree Celsius or so  higher, during the Eemian (115, 000 years ago, the last warm episode, caused by geometrical conjunction of Earth orbit details and the disposition of the continents towards the North Pole).

True some oscillations were fast and furious, like the famous “Dryas” episodes, the first one of which was 18K ago, or so (a mini glaciation suddenly affected Europe, caused by a brutal shut-down of the Gulf Stream beyond a place forward of Iceland, caused by a sudden lid of sweet, light, super cold water from the flow of an enormous cold lake).

However, most big changes were slow, species had time to evolve. Interestingly, the erratic climate of the last 50,000 years may have led to the extinction of the Neanderthals (in a theory mixing the exponential function with the concept of “quasi-extinctions”… from yours truly…) So climate violence is not without consequences.

But, as I said, the changes, especially the warming episodes, were rather slow. Not so now. Not only we are facing potentially the greatest warming since the Carboniferous, or maybe the greatest warming, ever, but we are facing it at a torrid pace: millions of years packed in a century or two.

Greta Thunberg The 15-Year Old Child spoke, and she spoke well!:

We are stuck because the worldwide production of energy is dominated by fossil fuels, and other burning of carbon made materials… the so-called “biofuels”, which sounds good until one realizes that it means burning forest and the like…

Not only the burning of enormous amounts of carbon generating humongous CO2 is disastrous, but it is getting ever worse. At some point, soon, the climate will break.

Yes, it  is not just a question of “climate changing”, and “global warming”. At some point soon, the climate will break. Actually ice shelves in Antarctica and glaciers in Greenland have been observed, disintegrating literally in minutes.

What to do? Miracles! Science made miracles. Science fabricated miracles already. Indeed one unexpected good surprise already happened: Photovoltaic cells (PV). PV is now the cheapest unsubsidized energy source, and even more so, when the dramatically adverse health consequences of fossil fuels are taken into account (probably much more than ten million dead each year, worldwide). However PV cannot work everywhere, and are not enough for 100% transportation, residential and industrial usage, except in relatively small zones in the middle of some deserts, like the Sahara. And that’s after digging for fossil water, and vast construction, CO2 intense, of buildings and exportation of industrial finished products.

Notice that the amount of waste varies enormously, per country and per capita. For example, look for France. France creates only one percent (1%) of the world CO2. That’s amazing, considering that France has the world’s fifth GDP. Yes, bigger than Great Britain, and only less than Germany, Japan, the PRC, and the US. In particular, Russia, with twice the population of France, and much smaller GDP, emits 5 times the CO2. US citizens, per capita, make three times more CO2 than the French….

The problem is: how do we make enormous quantities of energy in a way that doesn’t create enormous pollution? Not all countries have sun and wind, and water (although California does). A first approach is nuclear fission. That has bad reputation, because it was, for decades, mostly a military program. So safety shortcuts were taken. Also now California, which is full of sun, water, towering mountain ranges all over (thus hydro trivers), and oil, has decided to close its last nuclear reactor. California is where they fabricate most movies and thus most moods.

Much of the USA’s wealth rests on the fact that, for nearly 160 years, the USA was the world’s primary oil producer. Actually the world petroleum industry, was born in Pennsylvania in 1859, when “Colonel” Drake found how to extract “rock oil”.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/06/02/thermonuclear-fusion-or-civilization-fission/

Recently the Trump administration reinstated in full the US funding for ITER, the International THERMONUCLEAR Experimental Reactor constructed in France.

Thermonuclear fusion is the only enormous energy source that can be envisioned at this point. It is not a question of its possible existence some day, but of its profitability (ITER targets producing ten times more energy than is poured in from the French energy grid). However, because of the bad mood of the powers that be, funding for ITER was slowed down to a trickle. that’s all the more abysmal as ITER is a world project so everybody, and not necessarily the most competent countries, pitch in with some equipment of their own making…

Thus some circles started to agitate for a US thermonuclear reactor (after good results of a brand new thermonuclear reactor in Germany). A US reactor will enable to get the best talent to concentrate best practices.

Why do the powers that be love fossil fuels so much? Because oil means lots of power in very few hands. That goes very well with the present day oligarchy: oiligarchy promotes oligarchy. Countries where oil production is concentrated, with the exception of Norway are all more or less corrupt (yes, Canada, we are looking at you, kid). Massive plutocratic corruption then trickle down: some major Obama administration officials, like Susan Rice, his “National Security Adviser”, son of her dad, a director of the US Federal Reserve, had million of dollars in the stock of oil pipeline….

As Greta said, we need to listen to science, knowledge. We need more knowledge to get out of this mess. The alternative is the old fashion way: reduce human population massively, by culling. A good nuclear winter and killing 95% of humanity would give the biosphere a respite.

Otherwise, the most recent research (2019) shows that the atmosphere could heat up so much that clouds won’t form as they do now, and a further jump of eight (8) degree Celsius would occur. That is astounding. But it’s not just a theory. Actually, it was the other way around: such jumps were found in the fossil record, and couldn’t be explained… until now. Now that we have found that a tripling of the CO2 would make clouds disappear.

That explains why crocodiles have, more than once in the past, enjoyed the Arctic ocean, and sunned them on  beaches in Greenland graced by palm trees.

After such a jump of eight degrees Celsius globally, from the disappearance of clouds, on top of a rise of five degrees, at least half of the presently inhabited lands would be too hot for biological life, aside from the sort of bacteria which live below volcanoes (thermophilic bacteria). Is that what we want?

If that’s not what we want, there is only one solution: more brainiacs, more science, enough of it to replace the 90% of present day energy production by thermonuclear fusion. At this point, it’s just a matter of building big reactors.

Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: Oh, by the way, once we become good at the simplest thermonuclear fusion, we could use the fusion of Helium 3 (there is quite a bit in space, including Saturn, Jupiter, and the Moon). The charm of Helium 3 is that it fuses in such a way that it does not fling neutrons at the reactors’ walls (because it produces no neutrons). Hence there would be no radioactivity whatsoever (thus the reactor could last centuries…)

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Note 2: I thank my daughter Athena, 9 years old, to draw my attention to Greta and ask me more information on the subject at hand (my verbal answer is distilled in the essay above… poor child…)

 

God As Evolution Abstracted

GOD, CREATION OF THE CROWN OF EVOLUTION

If God is all-powerful, God can’t be a prisoner of human logic, God is beyond human logic (Descartes, creator of analytic geometry, and Pascal, a creator of calculating machines understood this). Thus God can lift an unliftable stone. (Saint Thomas had a petty vision of God, considering God couldn’t lift an unliftable stone, as if God were subject to human logic… Something Saint Thomas actually decided, as if he could impose on God His own powers…)

The problem with evil is exactly the same as with God lifting the unliftable stone: God and evil co-exist, it’s nothing humans can understand: that exact argument is held by Allah Himself, God Itself, in the Qur’an. The very co-existence of a good God and Evil is a proof of the existence of God, as it shows something is beyond human logic, thus all-mighty.

Man, the genus Homo, torments other beings, because if Man can find pleasure in tormenting, Man will be enticed to exterminate other conscious beings, as needed, including oneself. Indeed the latter is fundamental not just to ecological balance, but to the survival of… the genus Homo. Thus the infliction of pain, just as the reception of pain, have reasons beyond the individual, the group, or even the species. It is the genius of the genus.

Representant of the Genus Homo Rules Over the World As the one and only God that Matters. The son of God is son of Man, indeed.

So what wisdom did super mathematician and physicist Pascal suddenly found in the God of Abraham (after a severe illness attacked his brain)? What did Pascal find in that apparently cruel, illogical, somewhat demented, sometimes smart and good, Creator? Well, the inner logic of our own ethology: we are all children of a creative process we are made to abandon ourselves to, because we have no choice: creation itself, biological evolution… our smart, all-powerful, evil and most generous Creator… a (probably) subquantum process we don’t understand, but which certainly exists, and has all the characteristics of the proverbial “God”.

In a way, then, inventing God was a preliminary to discovering evolution. We found God, Evolution, and it created us, by evolving us with all the smarts Evolution is capable of. So here we are, most thankful, and now consciously in charge…

Patrice Ayme
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Notes:

a) In the most prosaic way, it was simply how late Roman emperors justified their God-like tyranny, as I have explained in many essays. The Christian God invented under the Flavian emperors was anti-Judaic, beside being pro-Caesar and pro-Roman. The Catholic God perfected and invented by Emperor Constantine depicted a God made in Constantine’s image. How convenient!

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

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b) The short essay above was a comment to the New York Times (published!), on an essay “A God Problem
Perfect. All-powerful. All-knowing. The idea of the deity most Westerners accept is actually not coherent.” By philosophy professor Peter Atterton. With all due respect, the essay didn’t break any new ground on the subject (my comment did).

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c) If God knows everything, and is all-powerful, deciding upon everything, why should we bother to gather knowledge? Thus the imposition of God (enacted by Constantine, see the essay linked above) was an imposition of a mood conducive to deliberate ignorance. And then what? Still another mood bathing We The People conducive to dictatorship, emulating

Democracy is first about knowledge. Those who block the transmission of knowledge block the inception of democracy. This has plenty of consequences such as addressing Pluto ownership of media or We The People not voting laws.

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d) Nineteenth century German pessimist yet sleep-around philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer drew attention to what he called the “diabolical” in his work “On Human Nature”:

For man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it. Other animals never do it except to satisfy their hunger, or in the rage of combat …. No animal ever torments another for the mere purpose of tormenting, but man does it, and it is this that constitutes the diabolical feature in his character which is so much worse than the merely animal.

But then, if one claims man is bad, god is good, as God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others, the conclusion is, again, that God enjoys evil.

e) When Pascal died his servant found sewn into his jacket the sentence: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars.” That was before the discovery of evolution in full. In those more obscure times, scholars and philosophers had no idea of what biological evolution was capable of, indeed those intellectuals couldn’t know that the mass murdering God of Abraham was exactly our Creator… with the help of the occasional asteroid or super volcano.

f) I tried to explain that the concept of God is extremely coherent if one understands that it is an abstraction of our true creator, biological evolution. In that light, all the apparent incoherence, the badness, and the goodness, the stupidity, brutality and the benevolent intelligence all make sense. Now, of course that return to tyrannical nature was very useful to emperor Constantine, who imposed Christianism…

Against powerful stupidity, the most subtle intelligence contends in vain.

Why so much blocking of the truth? Latest grotesque example: The New York Times just censored my observation that the right to exist of Israel came from its own long-term history, and that the destruction of Israel by the Romans had been illegal according to Roman law itself. … and that the Romans themselves found that out, and tried to correct it… (But fate, and red-hot fanatical imperial, tyrannical, lethal Catholicism intervened, re-establishing the horror… all the way to Auschwitz…)

The NYT is generally viewed as pro-Israel, pro-Jewish, etc. so, when someone provides them generously with a sophisticated, cogent and deep argument supporting their general somewhat Zionist position, one would guess they would be enthusiastic. Instead, they sent my long comment to Hades, as if it were a piece of Nazi propaganda. Stupidity has no bounds, even self-preservation doesn’t get in the way of reasoned idiocy. Better die content and stupid, than sad and smart, say the chicken and they cackle, self-admiring.

One is reminded of this happy period when prominent German Jews signed petitions to support the anti-Jewish policies of the German Chancellor cum President, the Guide, Adolf Hitler himself…. (Hannah Arendt fustigated the Judenraten, the Jewish Councils for that 20 years later, and was ostracized in turn. I don’t have a problem there as ostracism is a good thing for the wise to look for… As wisdom, and nothing but wisdom is plenty for a lover of wisdom, and stinging critters can get in the way, if one has to apply too much repellent)  

Friend John Michael Gartland intervened: “Stupidity seems to be contagious if you aren’t careful.”

Patrice Ayme: Indeed. Stupidity is certainly contagious, because the most energy laden activity is creative thinking. Thus, the most efficient way to save energy is by thinking as the sheep does, that is by pure duplication: follow the leader, typically another sheep, or then a meat-eating sheperd. Not following the rest of the sheep is not just energy expensive, it is uncomfortable, scary and dangerous. Only fools or philosophers will engage in it. Paradoxically, those obsessed by self-care should opine that, to think like a sheep is superior. Superior thinking is often just about superiority, not care.

Polish NAZI salute,

AUSCHWITZ 

 … the ultimate insanity. These three blonde idiots, teenagers from Poland, don’t even know that, according to Nazi doctrine, they were (probably) subhuman Slavs, and that Auschwitz was actually initially created to mass destroy Poles. There was a deliberate Polish extermination program, launched as early as Fall 1939. The extermination of the Jews was launched much later (after the Fall of France). Thousands of dark-haired Nazis assassinated hundreds of thousands of blonde Slavs, French and Jews… Officially from their self-contradictory racism, but truly from their fully unhinged Darkest Side.

The official Polish government report on war damages prepared in 1947 put Poland’s war dead at 6,028,000; 3.0 million so-called ethnic Poles and 3.0 million Poles who happened to be Jewish too, not including losses of Polish citizens from the Ukrainian and Belarusian ethnic groups. (Depending upon chosen borders, some scholars put the numbers slightly lower now.)

Meanwhile, the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum has just implored visitors to respect the memories of the 1.1 million people who were killed at the extermination camp — and not to balance on the train tracks, being pictured with beaming smile and two thumbs up at the entrance of the extermination camp, etc..

Decency and respect are in short supply nowadays. It’s as if these notions ceased to exist. Instead snowflakes cry as soon as the heat of critique shines upon them. Considering Nazism for what it was, a monstrous infamy, not a joke, is a duty, to be accomplished with thorough respect to the victims. Engaging in lack of respect for the victims is exactly repeating how the Nazis launched themselves, mimicking exactly what the Nazis did!

Stupidity by mimicking the herd doesn’t just economize effort. Stupidity is also selfish in other ways than plain brain economics. Stupidity by following the herd’s moods, emotions and ideas is also the key to power. Power sharing. One charging buffalo amounts to little; a herd of charging buffaloes is everything.

Thus a key to truly modern morality and probity is to refuse to follow the herd, as a matter of principle, in first approximation. Instead the mood of old fashion education has been the exact opposite, as youth is driven, like cattle, through a succession of rituals to pound into their thick skulls how they are supposed to behave, feel, and think.

Why? Old fashion education was made to support empire, empire the old fashion way, the gun boat style, or Kaiser style, or Lenin-Stalin way. Old fashion imperialism needed minds fit for that mission, minds all made in the same way. Minds who know how to go to the ball, get drunk, and don’t think too deep.

The requirements of civilization are now the exact opposite. The danger now is that as never before have the mental requirement been higher, because the Sixth Mass Extinction is fully engaged, and the thermonuclear gods are watching.

Young people should ask themselves why they are asked to do what they are asked to do. Starting with vaping, dating, celebrities, posing, prancing around, and believing goofing around in a socially acceptable way is the ultimate. Go to Auschwitz, you the naive and ignorant and learn that considering Hitler and his 80 million cretinous, vicious followers unbeknownst to themselves, is an excellent beginning of the conversation of humanity as it is, with itself.

Patrice Ayme

 

Proposed US “Socialism” 2020 Would Have Been Viewed As Extreme Right Wing In 1950

Alexandria Oratio Cortez (AOC), 29 years old, newly elected Congress Person from New York, one these little tyrants representing 700,000 of us, has suggested the New Green Deal, and, generally, has not hesitated to tell truth to power. Excellent. It even looks democratic. Meanwhile, satanic power (plutocracy) shall tell the truth to all the other 700 little tyrants out there, who lead the USA (and the world) into the sort of hell only plutocrats and their obsequious servants enjoy. AOC is too young to be president. However, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sanders are running. Warren, the blonde represented in the cartoon below, ex-Harvard Law professor, is derided as “Pocahontas” by Trump (long story), because she has some Native American ancestry. In my opinion, her proposed program is the bare socialist minimum. it’s significantly less than what was the governmental mainstream for US Republicans in the 1950s (see cartoon for a few glimpses). It turns out that the USA, by today’s US standards, was a socialist country in the 1950s. I have said that many times in the past. I am happy that this notion is reaching the mainstream, to the point cartoons are made about it.

An example of “socialism”, by today’s plutocratic standards, is the US government in the 1950s. Compare:

The USA went so right wing and pro-plutocratic in the last 70 years than what used to be unimaginable right wing is not unimaginable left wing

The ignorant will retort the USA is not a socialist country. And of course, they would be wrong. They are talking in prose, and don’t know it. The USA is a socialist country. Just look at Social Security, Medicare, VA, Bank Insurance, Unemployment Insurance, etc… All countries are more or less socialist, as they are all, more or less plutocratic. Even Trajan’s Rome, was partly socialist.

What is revealing is that the plutocratic ideology has progressed so much, it has become an evidence. For example in France the nominally left government of Macron wants to privatize the airports of Paris (ADP). The airports are profitable, but the Macron types love their privates, because privates pay their elitist kind more. Privatizing airports is an idea that would be considered crazy right-wing in the USA. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area,  all the bridges and airports are (local) government property. However, plutocracy sloshes around the globe like a never-ending tsunami of moral devastation, intellectual dissolution and freedom degeneracy. Once ADP has been privatized, in “socialist” France… the, argument can be used that even “socialists” privatize airports, the sky is the limit.

REPUBLICAN President Eisenhower brought up the top tax margin rate from 91% to 93% (DEMOCRATIC president Truman had put it at 91%…)… Also Eisenhower built a giant freeway system, which is still indeed, free, and used the army to enable all children to get desegregated education.

Earlier the GI Bill had insured that 16 million GIs get a free university education, up to whichever level, paid by the government.

It’s really telling that Warren and Sanders rather modest proposals are viewed as rabid Marxism. The chairman of the Federal Reserve bank just pointed out that the WORKFORCE PARTICIPATION RATE is the lowest ever. He concluded that an important part of the young US population has fallen out of the economy, not to say the society. Then he pointed out at the deadly opiates and benzodiazepine epidemics. and added, implicitly, that it looks as if they were falling out of life too. He didn’t mention the reduction of life expectancy, since Obama’s reign. But he could have.

That the chairman of the US central bank points out that the US socioeconomy is dramatically malfunctioning to the point of causing the unemployment and the death of millions is unprecedented.

Veering away from socialism and democracy, while plunging into plutocracy was the drama of Rome, and why Greco-Roman civilization failed… And many others. Even the grandson of Genghis Khan, having seized Baghdad with his Mongol, Frankish Armenian and Georgian allies said as much to the Caliph he was soon to crush inside a carpet.

Putting plutocracy back in its place is a matter of survival for civilization, hence the biosphere, not just justice and optimizing happiness over the many. To get there, we have to reset the global mood. When Obama was president, he professed his admiration for Reagan. What he forgot to point out is that Reagan and Bush Senior were more left than Obama. Faced with a financial crisis of smaller proportion, the Saving & Loan crisis, Reagan and his VP and Successor, Bush Senior, nationalized 2,500 banks. Faced with a much more severe crisis, caused by the Clinton deregulation of finance, Obama nationalized none.

It’s high time that the democrats stop being demoncrats, plutophiles like Obama’s VP, Biden, and, instead of selecting candidates who can be elected, select candidates who talk truth to power and about power. AOC said as much. La vérité sort de la bouche des enfants. 

Yes, there is less racism now than in the 1950s. At least in the USA. That implies that progress can, and did, happen (and it happened most when Marxist US president Eisenhower sent the troops to enforce school desegregation; the Rosa Parks bus thing was just a sideshow). But progress on skin color has been used obsessively to mask the regress of the devolution of power to just the few who (mostly) inherited it (yes, even Bill Gates).

Want progress? Learn to apprehend the truth, first. 

Patrice Ayme

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[Thanks to Alexi Helligar for the cartoon.]

The 737 MAX Is Intrinsically Flawed, Misshaped, Software Won’t Fix It

Flawed aircraft have existed before in the history of aviation. There were actually more flawed types than successful ones, arguably starting with the first three plane models. They were made by Ader, a French engineer who, helped by military contracts, built the very first planes, coal powered planes inspired by bats (first flight, 1890 CE, 13 years before the Wright brothers…) However, the main problem of Ader was that the internal combustion engine was not mature enough yet, and his coal engines were too heavy. Plus his planes had to carry coal and water… That could be fixed, and was fixed.

Boeing, airlines and aviation authorities don’t have these excuses with the 737 MAX. With the 737 MAX, as with Brexit, that offending idiocy, now on its way to hell, as deserved, the cause is the same: the financialization of the world, its greedsterization, not to say gangsterization. Never before has a so obviously flawed plane type been ordered in such immense numbers (more than 5,000). This absurdity, an exit from reason, illustrates the world’s corruption. This is a world failure. A flying Titanic, loved by all, until it pogos around.

So why is the 737 MAX so flawed? Engine location. The engines are too powerful and too forward of the 737 Max’s wing.

World’s Third Plane, a program supported financially by the French military. The Franco-US engine CFM 56, the world’s most numerous jet engine (35,000 sold!), weights 2370 kg. An A320 weights around 100 tons. So its engines weight around 5%. In Ader’s plane, the engines, with the propellers, weighted 20% (nearly 50 kgs)… Another problem was the weight of the pilot… A lot in a 258 kgs plane…

What is stalling? Basically, when the plane threatens to stall, it’s because the angle of the plane in the air flow is too great, the nose is too much up. Stalling first increases lift, while, and because, it kills speed forward. After the speed goes down, the only way to stay up, is to augment the angle, killing more speed… hence the name: stalling. When speed forward dies too much, no up nose angle will provide lift, and the plane falls like a stone.

The way to prevent stalling is to increase forward speed. For that the engines are asked to produce more power. This was the general recommendation of the aviation authorities, worldwide. However, this can be a problem in two engine planes: their engines are located forward of the centers of mass and lift of the plane, and do not line up with those; instead, when they are all fired up, they exert a torque. That contributed to the crash of an Air France A330 in a terrible storm in the “pot au noir”.

The “pot au noir”, well-known to French aviation pioneers carrying mail to South America (like Saint Exupery, of Petit Prince fame), is the black stormy intertropical convergence zone halfway between Brazil and Africa, famous for his giant thunderstorms; the Air France plane flew into an enormous storm hiding an even larger one behind; the sensitive sensors freezed, and the plane went crazy; the pilots, bereft of any vision in the black and stormy night applied power as prescribed, and the plane stalled, unbeknownst to them. The accident surprised the aviation authorities, but shouldn’t have: there had been similar close calls before, but they had happened when pilots could see outside, and orient themselves (since then simpler orientation systems have been added).

There was plenty of blame to pass around, as for example the US FAA had insisted on Pivot tubes for the A330s which froze more readily, being of smaller diameter… (Pivot a French engineer invented the tubes named after him which enable to measure an aircraft’s speed.) After the Air France crash, recommendations to pilots were changed, worldwide: don’t just increase power, but keep the nose down. The AF447 crash was instructive because it told us how not to handle potential catastrophes…  

A Norwegian 737 Max. Norwegian, an excellent company, has 18 (eighteen) 737 Max. And another 100 on order. Norwegian is asking those Boeing financial Chicago types to foot the bill. The picture shows clearly the engines are way too far in front.

The problem of the 737 Max is that the engines are so disposed that the torque causing stalling is much larger than in any other two engined jet. Boeing is trying to fix this with software… but genius software can’t correct all and any bad hardware. No amount of software will allow a turkey to fly across an ocean…

Why did Boeing, one of a handful of top aerospace companies make such a mistake? Well, Boeing was born and thrived in Seattle. In recent years, though, it moved its headquarters to Chicago, to be closer to the source of all powers in this age of doom and gloom, finance. Uncontrolled finance is the deepest source of evil (yes, it financed Hitler, Stalin, as I have explained in other essays). It’s also the greatest source of leverage. One can imagine Boeing executives exchanging stupid American style jokes with financial types suggesting Boeing may as well make an unstable plane subject to stalling while in peril, and correct that with software: software at this point is what makes financial overlords ever more wealthy (and they distribute crumbs to politicians, or even to media plutocrats, who then try to Brexit us…).

But why was Boeing forced to make a plane subject to stalling from its intrinsic geometry? Airbus. (We told you the French invented the devil, and then shrugged!)

A few years back, Airbus observed that jet engines had vastly improved, getting 25% more mileage, or so. Thus it was irresistible to make a plane with such engines. Airbus workhorse is the A320, the first fly by wire plane (after the Franco-British Concorde, and then the Space Shuttle). The A320 program cost 3 billion dollars by 1984, the first customer was Air France, by February 2019, 8674 A320s had been built. Airbus is now fabricating sixty-three (63) A320, per week: nine planes every single day are churned out of Toulouse… (It’s roughly the only thing working really well in France…).

The new A320 was appropriately called the “Neo”. When Boeing saw the A320 Neo coming, it was petrified… Boeing couldn’t just slap new engines on the 737, as Airbus did with the A320 Neo. You see the new engines are more efficient because of a higher “bypass”, a huge hidden turbine which acts like a hidden propeller grabbing air and pushing it like a giant fan. That’s all around the jet engine itself, and makes the entire engine much bigger. The problem was that the 737 is short-legged. The A320 is long-legged, so it could accommodate the much bigger, higher bypass engines. But not so for the 737, which crawls on its belly like a snake.

Why couldn’t Boeing have slapped longer legs on the 737? Because it would have had to modify the fuselage, and the wing roots, big time. In other words, it would have had to make a brand new plane. A brand new plane cost more than ten billion dollars, and take years to come around. Plus, Boeing, Airbus style, was advertizing that the most modest of training, with a tablet and a bit of paper, was enough to transition a pilot from the 737 to the 737 Max. That was a complete lie, as the aerodynamics of the types are completely different.

There was a famous example of a flawed plane: the British Comet. The first commercial jet. Four of them exploded (my mom flew on them between the explosions). The cause was discovered by making metal fatigue tests on the ground. The high altitude was causing the aluminium fuselage to expand and contract, until it unzipped itself. That could, and was corrected. No Comet exploded afterwards, and all other jets profit from the Comet’s unfortunate pioneering.

The case of the 737 Max is obviously different: the plane simply looks, and is, wrong (no Trump will try to resist, that’s hard, and, although he may think it, may not tell you so in his next tweet…)    

This is a small example of how the financialization of the world, making everything into profit and soft talking, software, leads to unmitigated disaster. I don’t think the 737 Max can be saved. Sure, it can fly. But, in the same exact dire circumstances as a A320 Neo, it will crash when the European plane will not.

Financialization of the world is a strange madness, an aspect and tool of plutocratization, an even greater insanity. It started with Reagan, big time, was amplified by Clinton, and that boy, Obama, couldn’t express his admiration for Reagan enough. Now in France, an idiotic, pseudo socialist government (truly from Rothschild, as US president Andrew Jackson would enjoy to point out) want to sell the airports to private entities… Because anything private is superior, they say. Andrew Jackson knew better, and was very explicit about it.

It’s a category error, as Aristotle would point out (hopefully): greed is superior when no higher motives can be called upon. Greed is what you do, when you can’t call on the highest, more specifically human motivations. Greed motivates rats, or maybe monkeys. We humans fly higher. Just don’t try it in a 737 Max…

Patrice Ayme

Debate Islam Intellectually: That Means Don’t Massacre Muslims

There was an abominable attack against people inside mosques in New Zealand. The perpetrators explained they created violence, to lead Jihadists in turn to be more violent, amplifying the initial violence, until apartheid ensues, and all Muslims go back home (never mind that some of the “Muslims” went to the “West” precisely because they couldn’t stand Islam anymore; moreover many of the worst Jihadists are “Western” converts to Islam, as the final battles of the Islamist State showed).

The idea of the assassins in New Zealand then is that the “Great Replacement” of “whites” by “Muslims” would stop, once the violence level is high enough.

That there is a “Great Replacement” is a fact, but the cause is not Islam per se. We have seen that story before, namely when the plutocrats took power in the Roman Republic: the population of Italy collapsed. It doesn’t have thus to do with Islam, but with the replacement of democracy by plutocracy, and the discouragement which then possess the subjugated masses…

Bringing violence in, amplifying it, could work, it has worked many times before, except if everybody knows the game, because then everybody goes meta on the game, and the game changes to a meta form, another game. All the more that, in this case, this is the ultimate form of game, where people become game and get killed… thus motivating all participants (that’s all of grown-up humanity) to become much more involved and smarter.

I have been there. Magnificent. I recommend visiting Isfahan, one of the world’s most spectacular cities. An occasion to ponder the history of iran, at the time of Shah Abbas…. And why, ultimately, didn’t work… Thus why a more democratic society is intellectually, thus physically, superior…

Earlier in the week, the relevant authority in Pakistan called me all sorts of names and asked for my site to be shut down (supposedly that was partly one; I would be interested to know how many islamofascist countries obeyed…) Clearly, civilization is having a problem with debating ideas.

Some Mosques are among the world’s most beautiful buildings, and should be religiously preserved, just for that. In the name of the religion of the most beautiful art. Although Islam administered countries didn’t contribute to civilization as much as Islamophiles claim, they played a positive rle, be it only, irony of ironies, by preserving a significant part of the Greco-Roman inheritance found in the regions the Jihadists had invade.

The basic Islam ideology was the fruit of Muhammad’s life. Said life was entangled with Christianism and Judaism. Muhammad actually met his first wife thanks to some Christian whom he had met in Christian land, next to (then Christian administered and occupied) Jerusalem. Later, a cousin of theat first wife, who was one of the most famous  and proselytizing Muslims in Arabia, suggested to muhammad that his visions in the desert were those of the Archangel Gabriel, talking in the name of the (Judeo-Christian) god. As there were difference between what Muhammad thought he heard and the practice of Christians and Jews, he endeavored to set them right in a set of revelations, the Recitation, the Qur’an.

Muhammad had other agendas too, and became a confirmed caravan raider, after being a caravan trader for his wealthy business woman of a wife. He was well aware of the fragile state of Rome and Sassanid Persia after a long exhausting war between these two. He declared that was the best time to attack in 1,000 years, after 12 centuries of Greek and Persian domination. So attack he did: he led a huge army into Roman territory… but the Romans refused combat and withdrew. Muhammad went back to Mecca, and mysteriously died, traditionally age 62 (but his real age may have been very different).

At Muhammad’s death, the first two “Successors”, the first two “Caliphs”, Abu Bakr and Omar, conspired to tweak or select much of the Qur’an. Aisha, Muhammad’s child-bride was involved in this too: confronted by Omar about the disappearance of some verses in the Qur’an, she claimed that she had hidden them under a bed, but, unfortunately, a goat had found the verses, and eaten them. Omar was a notorious mysogenine, and Aisha was notoriously free-wheeling (with Muhammad’s benediction).

Muslim warriors (Jihhadists) were promised to sit next to god if they died fighting for Islam. Under Abu Bakr and Omar, in a few years, the Muslim army destroyed Persia, and conquered Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The military expansion of Islam took all by surprise, and, within a generation, Islam had the largest empire on Earth ever. Ultimately, the Greek Fire of the Roman Navy prevented the fall of Constantinople. A circumnavigation around the Mediterranean subdued North Africa after a long and terrible war. The conquest of Spain, though, was rapid.

Then three Muslim invasion of France in quick succession failed, with huge Muslim defeats in Toulouse (721 CE), Poitiers (732 CE), Narbonne (748 CE). its army annihilated, the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus fell (750 CE), and was replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad… which, ultimate irony, was Iranian controlled…

The next irony: Baghdad fell to the Mongols, and their Frankish, Georgian and Armenian allies.  

In the following 13 centuries, more than 100 variant of Islam evolved. Some have really nothing in common: Black African Sunni Islam could have women not just with naked heads, but naked torsos, and free exhibitionist mentalities commensurate to their minimal clothing… While in some Arab countries, women could be killed, just for having interacted with a non-Muslim male.

My family is half from Africa, and I spent my childhood among “Muslims”. Except those Muslims had nothing to do with the bigots now presented as “Muslim”, who are anxious to impose their “Sharia”. Those a bit familiar with Muhammad know well that the Sharia, much of it established well after Muhammad’s death, doesn’t reflect Muhammad’s mentality. Although Muhammad had something against civilization as organized by Romans and Persians, he was not sexist, considering the circumstances: he apparently gave Aisha the discretion upon her sexual freedom, although they were married (she was still a teenager). When the bishop of Alexandria offered him a Christian female slave of great beauty, he loved her immensely, all the more as she gave him his only son (who died of disease, a few months before his father). Clearly, if one espouses Muhammad anti-sexist spirit, women shouldn’t be legally worth half of what men are worth, etc. Sometimes following the letter condemns the spirit. 

Greco-Roman polytheism didn’t force the masses to practice it. Christianism and Islamism (differently from their origin, Judaism) forced those who practiced other beliefs to become Christian, or Muslim, or then subjugated and exploited them. Hence Christians and Muslims eradicated all religions… except Judaism, which, being their root, proved harder to extricate…

Enough with all this cretinism. How do we mitigate it?

It is alarming that countries, such as Pakistan, which practice the enforcement of a particular superstitious religion, are allowed to be considered in good standing at the United Nations. Instead, they should be condemned and having various privileges removed. Democracies and the organizations and corporations originating from them should be forced to make cooperation with various fascisms increasingly difficult.  

Secularism is the way. The alternative is war. In the case of Pakistan, it means thermonuclear war. Before we come to that, we should debate.

Meanwhile, let’s protest against dictatorship, as millions of Algerians are presently doing. There the demonstrators don’t hesitate to tell the truth: the present FNL dictatorship was put in power by… France. More exactly what one should call the French presidential dictatorship of De Gaulle, then in power. Referendums had been conducted in Algeria, during the dusk of Paris colonial rule. The will of the Algerian people, long neglected, was then clearly expressed:Algeria wanted democracy, a Republic… And that will was violated by the powers that be, in power then in Paris (acting on behalf of the influences behind the French throne, and some came from the world of finance, Washington, Moscow…).

Paradoxically, the racist De Gaulle thought he could separate France and Algeria. Forever. That was naive on his part (or then his racism was out of rational control). Instead, we ended with the Great Replacement, because the same logic which exploited Algeria all too long, exploited France in turn… Whereas Algerians reacted with a demographic explosion, France, and Europe reacted with the opposite. That, again, is nothing new: we have many historical examples, of both effects, that’s how populations get replaced. And there is a logic underneath, it should be debated… because, nowadays, the weapons are bigger, and the going down, not as placid…

Patrice Ayme

Islamic Pakistan Declares Our Work “Extremely Blasphemous… Electronic Crime”. WordPress Censors It.

A Pakistan authority has demanded that we disable the following content on your WordPress.com site:

https://patriceayme.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/islam-cartoons.jpg?w=450&h=297

Unfortunately, we must comply to keep WordPress.com accessible for everyone in the region…

Muhammad explicitly said that the Islam ideology gave the mental framework to attack the Greco-Roman and Zoroastrian civilizations, and that, for the first time in 1,000 years, it was the precise military moment to do this. On both counts, Muhammad was perfectly right. And history proved it, as islam collapsed, through astounding military victories, both the Zoroastrian Sassanid empire, and the (Greco-)Roman empire. Now the god crazed ones have nukes…

So notice how a rabidly religious bully (the Pakistani authority) forces an entire publishing organization (WordPress) to submit to censorship, under the threat to outlaw it, altogether.

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Let me repeat slowly and amplify:

I have wasted lots of time reading carefully fundamental Islamic texts. One interest is to find out how crazy people can get, and the reasons which prop them to become so. So Jihadists and other Islam fundamental hysterics are of general interest to probe the human soul.

Islam, from the start, was a war religion. War is intrinsic to Islam, and the reason of its instantaneous, stupendous success. Islam arrived in Pakistan many centuries (at least 4 or 5!) after Christianism. Christianism arrived peacefully (however painful it may be for me to admit this, it’s a fact… in this particular case). Islam arrived in Pakistan in a few decades, at the point of swords. Immediately, the Islamists made the Pakistani aliens in their own land (they had to wear special clothing, pay a special tax, and would be killed if they show disrespect to the Muslim invaders, or engage physically with their enslaved females…)

Killing Christians for “Blasphemy” became routine in Muslim occupied Pakistan.

Muhammad explicitly said that the Islam ideology gave the mental framework to attack the Greco-Roman and Zoroastrian civilizations, and that, for the first time in 1,000 years, it was the precise military moment to do this. Then Muhammad headed a large army into the Roman empire: Muhammad, a man of his word, and his sword. On both counts, Muhammad was perfectly right. And history proved it, as Islam collapsed, through astounding military victories, both the Zoroastrian Sassanid empire, and the (Greco-)Roman empire… in a few years.

Of course world civilization cannot afford hysterical lunatics really believing in attacking civilization being armed with hundreds of thermonuclear weapons, as present Islamic Pakistan is. Thus, Pakistan is a bigger problem than North Korea (with which it collaborated in making weapons to fight civilization). Potential nuclear war by enraged Jihadists is a concern for the whole planet, as a threat, and a prospect. Whereas the UN engaged in well deserved boycotts against anti-human rights regimes such as Rhodesia and South Africa, resulting in changes, it has done little about rogue states with nukes (except South Africa, which agreed to dismantle its nukes). This playing with fire. No state clearly violating human rights should be authorized to have nuclear weapons…

Now for the official complaint of the Jihadists in power in Pakistan against our work:

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Begin complaint —

Dear WordPress Team,

I am writing on behalf of Web Analysis Team of Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) which has been designated for taking appropriate measures for regulating Internet Content in line with the prevailing laws of Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

In lieu of above it is highlighted that few of the web pages hosted on your platform are extremely Blasphemous and are hurting the sentiments of many Muslims around Pakistan. The same has also been declared blasphemous under Pakistan Penal Code section 295- B and is in clear violation of Section 37 of Prevention of Electronic Crime Act (PECA) 2016 and Section 19 of Constitution of Pakistan.

Keeping above in view, It is requested to please support in removing following URL’s from your platform at earliest please.

The below mentioned websites can be found on following URL’s:-

[…]

https://patriceayme.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/islam-cartoons.jpg?w=450&h=297

[…]

You are requested to contribute towards maintaining peace and harmony in the world by discontinuation of hosting of these websites for viewership in Pakistan with immediate effect. We will be happy to entertain any query if deemed necessary and looking forward for your favorable response at your earliest.

Regards

Web Analysis Team

+92 51 9214396

— End complaint —

Internet Censorship by Politically Correct: Example of the Guardian, UK

Systematic and injurious “pre-moderation”

The internet today isn’t what Tim Berners-Lee pictured when he co-invented with other CERN fellows the World Wide Web nearly three decades ago at CERN (the first WWW office was actually in France, as CERN straddles the border next to Geneva; most of the LHC accelerator is in France, fed by French nukes).

Berners-Lee said the web is “at a tipping point” as it faces threats like market concentration, data breaches and so-called “fake news.”

“For a long time, 20 years, I thought all I had to do was keep it, just keep it free and open and people will do wonderful things. Then in fact if you look and talk to people on the street now there’s been a big change. I think this has been been a tipping point.”

Berners-Lee is concerned by user frustration with ads and privacy, hate speech and fake news. Corporate giants like Google and Facebook have to be broken because of “danger of concentration.” Facebook is famous for banning artwork which popes paid for centuries ago, on the ground of pornography. Verily shouldn’t it be Facebook which is viewed as pornographic? Isn’t it Zuckerberg’s wealth from spying on We The people, the definition of obscene? Facebook is thus worse than the Middle Age Vatican, in a very important ways No problem? Of course a huge problem: Facebook is teaching the youth that, to be hypocritical to the point of idiocy is Politically Correct.

Internet Censorship 2014. Not what the self congratulating world ravaging Politically Correct would expect….

“Sir Tim”: “To tackle any problem, we must clearly outline and understand it. I broadly see three sources of dysfunction affecting today’s web:

 

• Deliberate, malicious intent, such as state-sponsored hacking and attacks, criminal behaviour, and online harassment.

• System design that creates perverse incentives where user value is sacrificed, such as ad-based revenue models that commercially reward clickbait and the viral spread of misinformation.

• Unintended negative consequences of benevolent design, such as the outraged and polarised tone and quality of online discourse.

While the first category is impossible to eradicate completely, we can create both laws and code to minimize this behaviour, just as we have always done offline. The second category requires us to redesign systems in a way that change incentives. And the final category calls for research to understand existing systems and model possible new ones or tweak those we already have.

You can’t just blame one government, one social network or the human spirit. Simplistic narratives risk exhausting our energy as we chase the symptoms of these problems instead of focusing on their root causes. To get this right, we will need to come together as a global web community.”

The source of nastiness on the Internet are often the same as the old sources. Simply, nastiness is amplified more. Quite a few Internet outlets who claim to be left (or perfectly balanced) have banned me, no reason given (except a major philosophy site which weirdly accused me of “fantastic” thinking). PC thinking is a calamity. But it existed in 1950: then PC was “Parti Communiste”, and everybody “left” was supposed to adore “Comrade Stalin” without reservations whatsoever. Problems appeared in the French delegation when, at the world congress the French delegation headed by Irene Curie walked out in protest after the Soviet worthy called from the tribune J-P Sartre a “dactylographic hyena“…

An example is the British daily The Guardian (the most interesting UK paper in my opinion). As I came across one more of their impudent warnings to me today, I sent them this:  

My comments to The Guardian have been “pre-moderated” since times immemorial (a decade?). I don’t know why: I seem pretty reasonable to me, and I strive to always be. I can’t imagine a particular incident. Wisdom is actually what I love and construct. I do not appreciate to be extended the dubious honor of this systematic, private 1984 pre-moderation: have all my comments to the Guardian in the last decade been censored? I do not know if a single one of my comments have ever been published. It is rather strange, as I search for knowledge and wisdom, to be told, every time I look at comments in the Guardian, that mine are presumably so vile, and dangerous, that the public has to be protected from them.

I wish you find the time and motivation to consider this matter. Having contempt and condemnation for individuals, unexplained, unjustified, is no way to make a happy, intelligent, debating planet.

This is not the first time I point this to The Guardian. I got no answer. The New York Times banned me for a decade, and reinstated after changing editors, and publishes now most of my comments. The New York Times had been apparently unhappy with my opposition to the Iraq invasion. But that error is now less popular than it used to be.

It is my sorrowful duty to have to point out occasionally censorship, in traditional or social media. I do this with any entity I perceive as systematically abusive.

As the Brexit tragicomedy enfolds, the British media, including the Guardian, should ponder whether the idiosyncratic, amused penchant they fancy for systematic bias (in this case against yours truly) is not the deepest cause of this mental derangement.

Sincerely yours,

Patrice Ayme

Space Law

Space Colonization: Unavoidable and the Solution to the Main Ills…
Man is the colonizing animal. Man, the genus Homo, evolved because of colonization. That’s why we evolved our long arms carrying tools or weapons, and our bipedal posture. Only thus could we survive in the savannah.

Colonization made us: we all descend from colonizers genetically and mentally, and culturally. Wherever one looks on this planet, a piece of the history of colonization is found, from Tasmania, to Thule, from Patagonia, to Kamchatka, and all over Africa.

The Earth can’t sustainably support the present human population, with the present technology. So two things have to occur: expanding our Lebensraum, our vital space, or improve our technology. Space colonization does both.

On the question of law, it will evolve as needed. It already exists, in embryonic fashion.

No less than nine US companies are involved in human space explorations, collaborating with NASA. The Trump administration, sensibly, has decided to focus on the Moon, and NASA is suddenly scrambling for heavy duty lunar landers, in cooperation with the said nine companies (latest developments, 2019). SpaceX is preparing a giant steel spaceship which will sweat during re-entry, to cool itself, which is really cool, as our friend the verbally challenged would say… The official idea of SpaceX is to go to Mars, but round trips to the Moon are more likely (be it only because radiation and low gravity will be too much going to Mars the slow way…)

This is all, not just very proud, but very good…
It’s not just playing with toys, not just fun, or giving hope. Not just Plutos on a rampage, getting their yayas out. And space is certainly not a pathetic distraction. That’s where we live, savannah revealed in its  righteous immensity.

Because it brings… space, & tech, as needed, space colonization is the only way to seriously mitigate the present war against the planet, hence how to make politics more sustainable, and avoid a general thermonuclear conflagration.
Patrice Ayme

ianmillerblog

One of the more notable recent events was the launching of a non-government rocket by a company run by Elon Musk to the International Space Station. Apparently Boeing is going to do something similar in the not too distant future. In some ways this is exciting, because one way or another, human ventures into space will increase markedly. I recall in 1969 sitting in front of a TV one morning (I was in Australia) getting direct feed from Parkes to see the first Moon landing in real time. (OK, there was a slight delay due to the speed of light, and probably more due to feed looping, but you know what I mean.) There was real tension because while everyone was reasonably confident that NASA had selected a good site, it was always possible the ground was not as solid as it might appear and it only needed for the…

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