WANT HUMAN? FREE TRUTH! Instead, San Francisco Promotes Lying, While Hating History, Reality

GAFA AGE SAN FRANCISCO IS READY TO SPEND HUGELY TO DESTROY US HISTORY!  

Teaching US Children the USA Was Wonderful In The Past, Knew Neither Slavery, Nor Genocide, and big bad imperialistic white men: Curiously, and infuriatingly, this has become a (pseudo) progressive agenda. Or when false and fake progressives reveal their true nature.

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The San Francisco school board unanimously decided to spend at least $600,000 of taxpayer money not just to shroud a historic work of art but to DESTROY it. Destruction of historical art is paramount for San Francisco leaders, so as to deny, and definitively erase, the reality of what happened in the USA: slavery and genocide. According to the SF School Board, US high school students should never be exposed to such notions.

In other words, San Francisco wants to succeed where the Nazis failed: claim there was never any holocaust, no slavery. Especially not in the US. Nothing to see, nothing to learn, for ever and ever, during the great San Francisco 1,000 Year Uber Reich. 

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The Terror Of Politically Correct Self-Contradicting Imbeciles:

One of the commissioners, Faauuga Moliga, said that his chief concern was that “kids are mentally and emotionally feeling safe at their schools.” Thus he wanted “the murals to be painted down.” Mark Sanchez, the school board’s vice president, later told the New York Times that simply concealing the murals wasn’t an option because it would “allow for the possibility of them being uncovered in the future.” Destroying them was worth it regardless of the cost, he argued at the hearing, saying, “This is reparations.”

So, according to this foolish reasoning, the way to “repair” what happened in Auschwitz and several thousands other Nazi extermination camps, is to erase all memory, and any traces of it. Washington and Hitler would become great men of history, who never engaged in racism, slavery and holocausts.

Those pseudo-”progressive” people as on this school board, are truly so stupid that they are becoming insane. 

Why insane? Because they want progress, but then they claim the past was perfect. So why to progress? From a perfect past? And since when can we progress from lies alone?

In a typical posture of his, Washington, as depicted in the mural San Francisco would pay any price to destroy, orders to proceed with “Manifest Destiny”, genocide, slavery, all the blood and injustice which made the US as it is. No good US citizen should ever know that real factual truth about the Founding Fathers, say the Snow Flakes. And that the USA was established through the most successful genocidal holocaust in the history of humanity. At least this is what the school board of San Francisco believe. Hitler would have gone to their feet and embrace them.

New York Times: 

“These and other explanations from the board’s members reflected the logic of the Reflection and Action Working Group, a committee of activists, students, artists and others put together last year by the district. Arnautoff’s work, the group concluded in February, “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” The art does not reflect “social justice,” the group said, and it “is not student-centered if it’s focused on the legacy of artists, rather than the experience of the students.

And yet many of the school’s actual students seemed to disagree. Of 49 freshmen asked to write about the murals, according to The Times, only four supported their removal. John M. Strain, an English teacher, told The Times’s Carol Pogash that his students “feel bad about offending people but they almost universally don’t think the answer is to erase it.”

Which makes one wonder who these bureaucrats actually seek to protect. Is it the students? Or could it also be their reputations, given that those in favor of preserving the murals are being smeared as racists?”

The work was made by a famous Communist artists, and it is 80 years old (that’s antique by California standards). The short of it is that the San Francisco Bay Area, long at the forefront of thinking, is now wrecked by the mentality of avid greedsters, who know only one thing that is greater than greed, and this is to cover-up what they are really doing. They want to erase any suspicion that they are what they truly are. So they scream they are anti-racist, or, as Google used to, order us “not to be evil”. This all started with Reaganism [1]

In this mural, African origin slaves can be observed. Female black ladies slaves are working the cotton fields in the background. So it was. The WPA paid for the work and the artist had been taught by the great Mexican master of social consciousness rising throughs murals, Diego Rivera. The WPA was the Work Progress Administration, crucial part of the New Deal, full of socialists, leftists and outright communists.

The Murals of Washington High were detested by the McCarthyists, but there was never any talk of destroying them. That was inconceivable. One didn’t destroy art, even in Nixon-McCarthy witch hunt USA.

New York Times: “By now stories of progressive Puritanism (or perhaps the better word is Philistinism) are so commonplace — snowflakes seek safe space! — that it can feel tedious to track the details of the latest outrage. But this case is so absurd that it’s worth reviewing the specifics.

Victor Arnautoff, the Russian immigrant who made the paintings in question, was perhaps the most important muralist in the Bay Area during the Depression. Thanks to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, he had the opportunity to make some enduring public artworks. Among them is “City Life” in Coit Tower, in which the artist painted himself standing in front of a newspaper rack conspicuously missing the mainstream San Francisco Chronicle and packed with publications like The Daily Worker.

Arnautoff, who had assisted Diego Rivera in Mexico, was a committed Communist. “‘Art for art’s sake’ or art as perfume have never appealed to me,” he said in 1935. “The artist is a critic of society.”

This is why his freshly banned work, “Life of Washington,” does not show the clichéd image of our first president kneeling in prayer at Valley Forge. Instead, the 13-panel, 1,600-square-foot mural, which was painted in 1936 in the just-built George Washington High School, depicts his slaves picking cotton in the fields of Mount Vernon and a group of colonizers walking past the corpse of a Native American.

“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”

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Fighting the Red Coats, Burning Tea And Currency… More Washington High Murals

Washington was heir of a prominent military English American family. He owned hundreds of slaves. Urged by his friend and savior Lafayette to free them, Washington used weasel words, in correspondence with him, for years, to shirk his responsibility. New York Times:

“In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.

“This is a radical and critical work of art,” the school’s alumni association argued. “There are many New Deal murals depicting the founding of our country; very few even acknowledge slavery or the Native genocide. The Arnautoff murals should be preserved for their artistic, historical and educational value. Whitewashing them will simply result in another ‘whitewash’ of the full truth about American history.”

Before any mental creation comes truth. Truth is established from real facts, not fake news, and big lies. Yesterday’s facts rule today’s horrors. If one wants to eradicate the latter, one has to understand the former.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/02/16/wrong-history-wrong-philosophy-nazi-lies-still-ruling-in-2015/

It is a fact that the North American English colony was founded, and prospered, thanks to genocide and slavery. Slavery was initially that of the whites (indentured servants), but, after a few years slavery became that of  Native Americans, and then imported Africans. Slavery permitted industrial culture of tobacco which made the English Colony highly profitable. Genocide was encouraged by New England cities which paid for Native scalps. Land was gained, one scalp at a time.    

Those brutal, homicidal social structures were transmitted to the USA, which pursued slavery and genocide on an even greater scale. That’s somewhat known… But other facts have been forgotten: the argument has been made that the true motivation of the American War of Independence was not the scandal of taxation without representation, but the fact that British authorities prevented European colonists to invade Native American lands (such as the Ohio Valley where Colonel Washington had important investments). Surely partisans of the established order will not entertain such a possibility.   

Are the facts of English American colonization, and of the USA for much of its history terrible? Yes. But the only thing more terrible than terrible history is to deliberately deny it ever happened. Happened. Indeed, the USA was born in extreme violence and that explains why, to this day, for example in health care or guns, or extreme inequality, extreme violence is felt to be the normal order of things.

In Nazi Germany, the Holocaust of the Jews was rendered possible only because the (Nazi) authorities succeeded to hide the truth enough from most of the German population that plausible denial could be brandished. The will to hide the truth is as inhuman as it gets: indeed, it defeats the essence of human beings, who are truth machines (Eat enough mice, and truth will come out). 

Truth can be, often is, inhuman, it’s most human to uncover it… And then one needs to explain it, prior to re-engineer the reality that truth was depicting into something more humane. There is nothing more important to teach to children… through countless examples. 

Instead, nowadays, a mood has arisen that truth should be hidden, guided by the will to total comfort all the time: hedonism gone mad, not just lazy. This deplorable mentality is what is needed to keep on going with the mass extinction of the biosphere, doing nothing about it.

That mood festers particularly in the San Francisco Bay, a land of contradiction. How come so many contradictions? Think of it: to commit a crime, it’s generally easier, or even necessary, to hide it, so one needs a cover-up. The cover-up is best, when it completely hides reality. So crimes and cover-ups denying them tend to cohabit. And the more, and deeper the crimes, the more outrageous and extensive the cover-ups. 

A lot of the business model in high tech applications has consisted in running ahead of the law, with the complicity of bought off politicians (such as found in the Obama administration [2]).

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It All Happened Before: Rome Also Collapsed in an hypocrisy called Christianism so immense, and so insane, that all of desired reality came to be known as the “Apocalypse”: 

Covering up reality with its opposite fosters insanity, because the appearances are the opposite of reality, and then people have to engage in ideologies enabling this schizophrenia. See Brexit [3]. This is exactly why Roman Catholic Orthodoxy (Christianism) became the state religion of the collapsing Roman empire, where the truth was that a tiny .1% minority, the plutocracy, in combination with the military dictatorship, was exploiting nearly all the GDP, while the rest of the population was living in ever more horrendous conditions… 

To deny that reality, Christianism said it was all for the best, as the collapse of civilization would bring the apocalypse, and then the Messiah would return. And only then (the same schema holds in Islam).

Real progressives assess reality better than those stuck in the past. To fail to discern between the depiction of a thing and the endorsement of a thing one learns to do when one is a small child. To look at the painting above and to conclude that it “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, Manifest Destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” is apparently an example of how folly brings infamy. But the motivation below this may be even worse. There may be a method to the folly: greed once again…

The San Francisco Bay Area is increasingly dominated by the ideology of pleasing the wealthiest men in the world. The first thing those plutocrats want, is that we take leave from reality and our common senses. That plutocratically fostered insanity starts with saying art is not art, and history didn’t happen, because it shouldn’t have happened.

The rest of the world is forewarned: the world’s center of high tech is becoming mad… Yes, remember the fish rots by the head (same happened to France, not so much in 1940, rather than after the Second World War, during so-called “decolonization and “French Theory”, as I have explained extensively). 

The assault against reality was planned by the powers that be, and instigated by their sycophants masquerading as “antifa” or “progressives”, or “liberals”, “snow flakes”, etc. Verily, they are just obnoxious pigeons obsessed by crumbs, ready to feel and think anything to get some more… of whatever they believe they desperately need. 

Want human? Free truth!

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In the 1980s, top Democrats came to collaborate with Reagan (except for Trump, who fought Reagan to death). It was all a huge and gigantic lie. David Stockman, Reagan budget director, explained that “trickle down”, Reagan economic program passed by O’Neil and other Democrats, the policy of advantaging the wealthiest was all hidden below a big lie: 

“It’s kind of hard to sell ‘trickle down,’ so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really ‘trickle down.’ Supply-side is ‘trickle-down’ theory.

— David Stockman, The Atlantic…

Thereafter, all the way to the end of Obama’s second term, Reagan was the big lie which kept on giving… to the plutocrats, and an increasing unequal society.  It’s no coincidence that Trump, who opposed Reagan, came up and screamed to all they didn’t know what reality was. Notice I am not embracing Trump here. Simply pointing out that Alternative facts and Alternative Reality, didn’t wait Ms. Conway to rule contemporary politics.

And here is the crux: As that big lie, that the Reagan policies would help the Commons, whereas in truth, they were designed to foster plutocracy, worked basically four decades, all of society, even the rabid low lives opposed to it, learned to lie…

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[2] Some have accused me to have Obama Derangement Syndrome (I invented the TDS diagnostic, so that was amusing). However, I observed with glee, that, in the last few weeks, a bipartisan and Democratic Congress-Trump White House effort has been launched against the top tech monopolies that Obama took his orders from, and which are now the world’s most powerful companies… and most stealing companies…

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[3] Brexit claims to want to Make England Great Again, but all the MEGA it will bring will be British implosion (and that’s bad for the UNSC!) So it self-contradicts: the way to keep the UK strong is to make it the spine of Western Europe, with nuclear armed France….

 

What Are Numbers? Math is most abstracted physics!

German mathematician Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) published in 1888 a paper entitled Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? What are numbers and what should they be? 

Here is my answer: forget what you know. 

Numbers are neural networks. Small numbers have small networks, big ones, big networks; so the nature of numbers, change, as they get bigger…(According to me, listening, delighted, to the indignant screams of distant mathematicians ).

Diagram Chasing all of them: not a coincidence. Instead of having “It from Bit”, one has it from action (arrow in Cat theory, action potential with neurons, fundamental process in physics…)

A few immediate applications of this master idea:

1. Numbers are learned, because neural networks are learned.
2. Advanced animals, having advanced neural networks, should be capable of having those neural networks we call numbers.
3. Big numbers are different from small numbers, because big neural networks are different from small ones. Here again is the idea that energy should matter in mathematics (the conventional thinking being just the opposite: energy doesn’t matter).

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Kronecker’s also quipped: “God made the natural numbers. Everything else is the work of man.”

Kronecker proceeded to define numbers from Set Theory, invented for the purpose. Later Bertrand Russell found a problem with Set Theory, the set of sets which are not elements of themselves brought a contradiction. Russell tried to get out of that with a hyper complicated theory. In modern times, mathematicians prefer to use Category Theory. [1]

I go beast on how to construct numbers. Beasts have brains, and brains have neural networks.

Kronecker thought mathematics is the work of man. But, actually all advanced animals move in a way proving they are capable of differential calculus. Far from being the work of god, differential calculus is the “work” of dog. Without differential calculus, that dog can’t hunt. OK, dog is not conscious of god, or of the calculus it’s using. So what?   

Now for a few easy bits:

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Let’s notice that numbers are definitely the work of the genus Homo: 

Consider the integer 152. 152 is the work of man. Just like “Yes” is the work of the Englishman. 

152 means: 100 + 5×10 + 2. But that’s only in base ten. In base 60, that would be: 60 x 60 + 5 x 60 + 2… Which converts to 3,902  back in base ten. 

So “152” is not an absolute notion. For that integer to make sense, the basis in which it lives has to be expressed (and what the notation means, such as 2 = 1+1…). The Babylonians invented base 60 to handle big numbers in astronomy. We still use base 60 to this day, for angles and time. So “152” is a cultural construction. In several ways. 

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So how come Platonists claim that numbers live out there, in a special realm of their own, if there is so much human explanation and convention to provide, with just basic numbers? Most mathematicians also believe their are exploring that realm of Plato. But actually all they are exploring is the possible connections which can be built within the neural networks inside their brains. So they are exploring physics, a bit like a child on a beach explores which sand castle she can get away with. A difference with building sand castles is that the possibilities are few and are carefully recorded, becoming the body of that culture and language called “mathematics”. 

An example is the Archimedean axiom. The Greeks knew about it well: it’s in Euclid, and it says that, given two magnitudes, A and B, there is always an integer n so that: nA > B.

If one denies that axiom, one gets infinitesimals… That was made rigorous through Model Theory, in the 1950s, three centuries after Leibnitz first introduced infinitesimals, starting a fight with Newton.

No Plato universe of “forms”… or rather, they exist, but live as geometries inside brains…

Even more dramatic are hyperbolic and elliptic geometries: they were discovered at least a century before Euclid. Then they were forgotten, and a stupid debate occurred for 21 centuries about whether the parallel axiom (one parallel to a line, one only, through a point off the line) was independent of the others. Mathematicians, even the brightest, had forgotten that their ancestors had found geometries with many, or no, parallels…)

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Let’s recapitulate: culture is composed of (vague, but good enough) descriptions of neural networks, which can be transmitted. Once contracted, those neural network templates modify brains in similar ways. Those similarly modified brains behave all similarly, mimicking innate characteristics.  

Language enables a transmission of neural geometries, topologies, logics, and categories. Language is primitive in most advanced animals, consisting in grunts, cooing, gestures, etc. But in Homo language became an advanced mental cultural duplication system (and some of the mentality passed is mathematical, but not only). 

True, advanced animals have a sort of pseudo-innate capability to evolve neurobiological mathematical structures: through trial and errors mimicking their relatives, or experimentation with what works, young animals brains learn to optimize trajectories: the brains of many predators in pursuit make subsets of themselves into differential calculus machines. 

So if Plato’s “forms” are real forms in (generalized) geometry and topology… what are the latter made of? Good question! Therein come our old friend, the Quantum Wave… 

Clearly, math is the most abstracted physics.

Patrice Ayme

Immigration Horror: Father & Daughter Drowned

The picture below speaks volumes.

 

Father and Daughter Drowned Swimming Across Rio Grande, to get into the USA

It was actually an accident, and the father was culprit of underestimating the danger. Yet, this horror calls to action…

New York Times:

“The father and daughter lie face down in the muddy water along the banks of the Rio Grande, her tiny head tucked inside his T-shirt, an arm draped over his neck… Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez died with his 23-month-old daughter, Valeria, as they tried to cross from Mexico to the United States…

On Tuesday, Democrats in the House were moving toward approval of an emergency $4.5 billion humanitarian aid bill to address the plight of migrants at the border…

The young family from El Salvador — Mr. Martínez, 25, Valeria and her mother, Tania Vanessa Ávalos — arrived last weekend in the border city of Matamoros, Mexico, hoping to apply for asylum in the United States.

But the international bridge was closed until Monday, officials told them, and as they walked along the banks of the river, the water appeared manageable.

The family set off together around mid-afternoon on Sunday. Mr. Martínez swam with Valeria on his back, tucked under his shirt. Ms. Ávalos followed behind, on the back of a family friend, she told government officials.

But as Mr. Martínez approached the bank, carrying Valeria, Ms. Ávalos could see he was tiring in the rough water. She decided to swim back to the Mexican bank.

Back on the Mexico side, she turned and saw her husband and daughter, close to the American bank, sink into the river and get swept away.”

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So what to do? The usual way is to throw a bit of money at the problem, making the refugees more comfortable. The real solution is to make it so that people from El Salvador or Sub Saharan Africa, want to, and can, stay where they live. I am not saying this because I am anti-immigrant: I was always an immigrant. I lived in Algeria, the Sahara, France, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali, Peru, Bolivia, Iran, etc… My places of main formative residence, historically speaking, being Senegal, France and California… And I am all for immigration. Yes, at least one I nearly got killed doing exactly what the father above did: underestimating a swift river.

 

But the solution to mass refugee flows is to make countries livable. Salvador is wrecked by murderous gangs. The USA, and other better endowed countries, have to take action, and fix the derelict countries. OK, it smacks of “Mission Civilisatrice”, Colonialism, Banana Republics, etc. So what? Do you hypocrites have a better solution? Well, let’s make it easier for you: there is none. No other solution. Force has to be applied, at the source. And no banana republics, by the way. Civilizing mission is no banana, facebook, Instagram, or Google, republic.

The reason the gangs are not as thick on the ground in the USA and the EU is force. Force of law, force of police, force of civilization. Remember Rome’s fasces, carried by special bodyguards, the lictors: a bundle of rods around an axe. The axe was not present for lesser offices without capital punishment authority.

Civilization is rendered possible only by the management of force… because, as technology progresses, ever more force, not to say violence, is present. And yes those countries which pollute the most and organized the present day world the most, are the most culprit…

Patrice Ayme

Plutocracy Is A Cancer, And It Strikes Minds, Hearts, Cognition. Tax It To Death

Tax Plutos To Death, Don’t Listen When They Say They Love Men, Remember What Happened With The Roman Republic:

Plutocracy is a cancer affecting civilization. It turns up in civilization after civilization. Sometimes it turns metastatic and it kills its host, the clearest example being the Roman State. But there are many other detailed examples, for example the fall of Mayan civilization, which was a combined ecological-plutocratic-military crisis, just as befell Rome [1], or China.

Plutocrats love to be called “philanthropists”… lovers of man… As if they were the only ones to love people. The concept is as old as the fascist, authoritarian, cruel, extremely unfair and demented Roman empire: the wealthiest people in Rome used to organize games to entertain most of the population (the Plebs) and distribute to them money… just as one distribute crumbs to pigeons, to make them friendly.   

What “loving men” means, in practice, is that the power of the wealthiest is augmented further by patronage. “Patron”, from the Latin patronus “defender, protector, former master (of a freed slave); advocate,” from pater (genitive patris) “father” was a central concept under the fascist Roman empire: a hierarchy of wealthy masters own all the power of society… 

How Brexit Started: with the Brexit of the British Pound, Thanks To A few Men. Brexit, to this day, is there just to profit a few men from the world Plutocratic (read Satanic, if it helps) conspiracy, holder of all media, most public opinion, the most prestigious universities, among other things…

An example: Bill Gates personal wealth is above 110 billion dollars, but that is augmented further by the power of his Foundation, a “charity” which he controls, and which is worth more than 60 billion dollars… Without counting all what said Foundation spent in the past, now converted into the influential networks of power and gratitude it built over the years. 

Indeed, Money is power. But power is also influence, and reciprocally. Don Corleone, in the Godfather, exerts his power through influence. Influence is what made senior beings powerful over the millennia, even as their forces wane from age. Gates used to own Monsanto, which pushed GMO compatible with Roundup (glyphosate) which, besides being carcinogenic, impoverishes the soil irreversibly. The Gates Foundation, another instrument of power influenced states to invest in that same  GMO-Roundup combo.

The Roman Republic used to limit both wealth and power drastically, with all sorts of interdictions. Consuls exerted full power for just a month, alternating with their colleague for a year, and couldn’t be re-elected for years. Their powers didn’t overlap with the “sacrosanct” tribunes of the People, who proposed legislation. And so on.

Above a limit, today’s equivalent of $50 million, the tax on a family was 100%. So immense wealth was unlawful in the Republic. Most people were taxed only 1%.

The Republic degenerated and collapsed because globalization caused by Roman conquests enabled the wealthiest Romans to escape Roman law by going overseas. 

If we want democracy to perdure, let alone grow, it’s time to do the same.

I suggested, years ago that the Roman Wealth Limit was around 50 million dollars in today’s currency. Now Elizabeth Warren has suggested to tax it, with a special wealth tax (which is very small in percentage). The idea has now been embraced by a number of Plutos… Including Soros. Soros, all by himself, is the grandfather of Brexit: Soros pushed the British currency, the pound out of the “European snake” (of currencies). This is symbolic of how much damage too much power in a single man can bring to bear. Now Sorors whines PM Orban of Hungary will not allow him to have his own university system there… And all the EU leadership whines with Soros, because those Euro doggies are all anxious to please their master. 

Having individuals with too much wealth, or, more generally, too much power, is an impediment to the progress of civilization, because:

1. Plutocracy amounts to having eight billion people to be led by eight brains (to schematize a bit; in the case of fascist imperial Rome, it was just one brain, thus resulting in crushing imbecility). So the brain index, instead of being one, is one billionth, namely one divided by a billion. Just watch Bill Gates claiming to be a “friend of man” as he pushed for GMO friendly to soil murdering glyphosate, to understand how large the imbecility. These eight idiots are right now deciding how to prevent the collapse of the biosphere. I made one of their subordinate (and friend, of course) cry and enrage twice in the last month… Why? Because they are weak minds, anxious to be always flattered…
2. The preceding constitutional idiocy is conducive to the following behavior: all citizens waiting for The One and Only Man to think for them, and tell them what to do, what to think, what to expect, what to feel, what to care about. As happened during the fascist, militaristic, idiotic and collapsing Roman empire (in contradistinction with the preceding Republic which had made it possible). This leads to mental collapse, curiosity, nobility, basic human decency and initiative collapsing with it. We saw it when Rome fell, when China fell, when Baghdad fell (to the Mongols and their Christian allies… and as the Mongol commander himself said at the time!)

3. 

   Admiring such smiling good looking, good nature thieves, is corrupting for souls and hearts. It corrupts minds, telling them thievery brings good things. The crime itself is great, transforming it into something to look for, worse. But that’s the whole idea and emotion the corrupt Pluto media are pushing for. The (pictured) Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s home was renovated with £2.4m of taxpayer-funded costs, royal accounts show. Frogmore Cottage in Windsor was turned into a single property for Prince Harry and Meghan, from five separate homes.
   The Queen’s Sovereign Grant from the Treasury was £82m in 2018-19, with £33m set aside for maintenance, including major work on Buckingham Palace.
   The Sovereign Grant is funded by profits from the Crown Estate.

Stopping the collapse will require brains, and that means absolute, direct democracy, as when tiny Athens stopped, mostly all by herself, the gigantic Achaemenid Persian corrupt imperial plutocratic juggernaut (at the Battles of Marathon, Salamis, in Egypt, etc.). A

Absolute, direct democracy means lowering the powers and wealth of individuals. Rome did it for five centuries, early on, let’s learn and duplicate. Now a number of Plutos have asked their taxes to be brought up. See in the New York Times, June 25, 2019:

I’m in the 1 Percent. Please, Raise My Taxes.
Wealthy people like me should commit to reducing the ravages of economic inequality.

By Eli Broad (Mr. Broad is a philanthropist and former entrepreneur).

Well, it’s not just a matter of reducing. Plutocracy has to be annihilated, under all its forms. And many of them there are…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Roman rise coincided with a climatic maximum: war temperatures, but more rain over the Mediterranean (200 BCE to 400 CE). Rome was rising militarily, due to its semi-direct democracy… But the fascist empire certainly collapsed in part because of cooling. In 406 CE, something never seen before happened: the Rhine froze so much the Germans could gallop across. That took the Franks, in charge of imperial defense of Gaul, by surprise. Although the Franks had defeated the Germans many times prior, that time, they let them through: Vandals, Alans, Burgonds, Goths, galloped across. That was the invasion fatal for the Occidental empire. All those Germans (and the Scythians) were trying to escape the Huns, who, themselves, had come all the way from Mongolia, and were perhaps pushed by adverse climate change…

 

The Mayas confronted an, multi centennial epic drought. Instead of reacting appropriately (as Japan and the European states did around 1300 CE), political panic and military solutions imposed themselves, and the two great power system saw a third power rise, and the ecology and human capacity to adapt to it, collapsed. 

GROUP Selection, Not Selection Of THE Fittest

Groups cannot be avoided, when considering human evolution and selection, because humans always lived in groups: WE EVOLVED FROM GROUPS, AS GROUPS.

Many intellectuals believe that there was an original Eve, and Adam, and we all come down from them. This is a variant of the Celebrity Cult, in this case the indispensable first couples, from which the concept of fist couples emanates (in the clouded minds of the conventional establishment members). For example Yuval Harari, an historian with scientific spirit pretense, but falling short from the deliberate naivety which makes him so attractive to plutocracy, says in his famous book “Sapiens” that at some point a female ape had two daughters. The descendants of one of them are us, the other, the chimps.

This is, most probably, false. And that it is false matters a lot, philosophically speaking, as I will thereafter show.[1]

Why?

Selection of the fittest works best with bacteria, and maybe only with them. It can’t work much with humans. Humans evolve very fast, precisely because they are apt and inclined to go colonize the weirdest environments, each of them a new ecological niche. In the last 300,000 years, many human species still existed. At least three, with interbreeding capabilities, Denisovans, Neanderthals, and African Sapiens, contributed to our (rather mixed!) ancestry.   

Hominidae from the superfamily Hominoidea (“Apes”) are so highly social that they cannot long survive without the group (even Orangutans live in groups, supermales communicating with following females located miles away, thanks to their booming voice). Thus, picture this: a female has two daughters, A and B. However their descendants then interbreed with other members of the group and back with each others’ descendants: thus descendancy then becomes an entangled network. Two groups in intergenic relations will then appeared as two entangled super networkd with attractors (in the differential topological sense). And so on. Physical separation of human groups (for whichever reason: natural disaster, emigration, etc.) will then congeal increasingly different genetics. At no point, though, will there be a single Adam and Eve couple. Physical separation is easily obtained, as human beings ecological load is so heavy that it forces separation, lest everybody starves.

In the drawing above, one can see arrows going back and forth. This means that Chimps and Australopithecines would have kept breeding back and forth, even after the two groups separated. There is indeed evidence that the initial separation was around ten million years ago, but there was some interbreeding around six million years ago.

Adam and Eve? That’s good for the Bible. (Some are still all too inspired by the Bible!)

Notice that selection of a fitter group is rather then partly a question of colonizing a new ecological niche, and fitting to it genetically. Once again, we see that colonization promoted the evolution of humanity. One needs a particular mentality to go colonize. There is no doubt it became part of human ethology.

Aside from the latest philosophical point, some may sneer that even Darwin mentioned group selection (although he preferred individual selection), so the preceding is nothing new. Elaborated mathematical arguments have appeared, and made super-stars. However, recently, there was serious push-back. [2]

The advantage of my argument above is that it is as simple as it gets: mutation, in one individual, would immediately spread back to the group. Or a subset of the group. So subsets of groups of individuals evolve, only them can evolve, into separated genomes… because of the addition of other factors (like physical separation).

Group selection is entangled with individual selection. Let’s take an example from my own theory of the quasi-extinction of Neanderthals: I argued that, inside a group, individuals with more Neanderthal genetic material would be harder to reproduce during quasi-extinction events: Neanderthals had much more muscle mass, and also 10% more brains.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/04/27/neanderthal-superiority/

The more massive Neanderthal brain, at rest, would, all by itself, augment caloric needs by nearly 3%. So more Neanderthalized children, in a group of individuals of mixed genetics, would be harder to feed, and would have poorer health… hence would tend to survive less.

So, progressively, non-obviously very advantageous Neanderthal genes would tend to disappear… But the evolution would be in the group, by the group.

See my: Math Extinguished Neanderthals:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/why-did-neanderthals-disappear/

We were not just born altruistically, we were born from altruism, from groups… And from the desire, the will to power and discovery, to find new ecological niches, out of which groups, species are born… Now all over the Solar System, and, soon enough, the entire galaxy…

The same happens with the evolution of ideas: although the initial idea will arise in just one individual, it amounts to nothing, if not transferred to a group. And, once transferred to the group, it is often transmogrified into something else, again to be transmuted by some more individuals therein.

Last, but not least: last month the fact that Quantum Jumps are complex phenomena was demonstrated; there is a warning over the Quantum system, before a Quantum Jump occurs. This opens various “Sub Quantum” (to use my semantics) perspectives, including controlling Quantum processes. Could something similar happen with evolution? Could we control it? Of course. Artificial selection has been known for many millennia. Ancient Greece was practicing it deliberately, mixing artificial and natural selection to evolve new phenotypes, which were then sold all over the ancient world for lots of money (genetic engineering is not new).

The way then biological evolution was naturally occuring was through ecological niches. Same for the evolution of ideas, or moods, emotions: mental niches will engineer mental creativity. This is the best, deepest, most human reason to foster diversity. Not just diversity of skin, but diversity of mind, opinion, sentiment, mood, ideas. As basic internet services are turned into public utilities (part of E. Warren’s program), one has to keep this as the most important principle.

Patrice Ayme…

***

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[1]: Harari, is a Oxford PhD historian, philosopher and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow… I wish I had the time to rewrite his books, the right way… (They are like Patrice lite and like, yet, all too often, wrong; however better read that than nothing… Some Plutos I know swear by the book; they are careful not to read what I write; whereas Harari buttresses conventional thinking, thus is very good. For example, Adam and Eve, thus the Bible…)

***

[2] Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, the “father of sociobiology” and a world-expert on ant colonies, was one of the pillars of 20 C view of evolution, has argued that “multi-level selection”—essentially a modern version of group selection, and what is implicit in my Neanderthal decrease theory—is the best way to understand social evolution. In his earlier work, Wilson was a staunch defender of kin selection, but no longer; he has recently penned sharp critiques of the reigning kin selection orthodoxy.

Richard Dawkins, of the infamous “selfish gene” and “meme” concepts, says that Wilson is “just wrong” about kin selection and that his most recent book contains “pervasive theoretical errors.”  Once again, the argument above is too simple for that: groups cannot be avoided, when considering human evolution and selection, because humans always lived in groups: WE EVOLVED FROM GROUPS, AS GROUPS. It’s what’s called in mathematics a counter-example: a simple case which brings down an over-simplistic, thus erroneous theory. 

Dawkins brandished the example of (European) red squirrels being outcompeted in Britain by (American!) grey squirrels. Indeed, this is not a case of genuine group selection, as the success of one group and the decline of another is a side-effect of individual level selection. This has nothing to do with the argument here, as the two species of squirrels don’t interbreed…

***

The Age Of War Is Coming. (In Part Courtesy US Oil.)

Yes, Earth’s climate is changing a little bit. Soon it will change enormously, and at a torrid pace. US politicians and their “Democratic” and “Republican” followers are mostly to blame: while North Americans and Australians emit more than 20 tons of CO2 per person, per year, a country such as France makes do with 4 tons (and the UK has collapsed it emissions, down to 6.5 tons now). Listen to the “Democratic” candidates: even the supposedly “anti-war” Tulsi Gabbard from Hawai’i (an intense fossil fuel state), already rejects the responsibility on other powers about doing something against climate change. Says pretty Tulsi:”The United States alone can’t accomplish this“. (Supreme hypocrisy: most of the CO2 crisis was originated in the USA!)

US led inaction is really a splendid spectacle: Trump is rightly accused, however the excellently disguised Obama did the heavy lifting, to further the CO2 production, by pushing for massive fracking (“bridge fuel to the future” he called it). Now the US is back to its usual position of world’s first producer of fossil fuels.

So the climate will change further… and will become ever more favorable to war.  

***

Parthia came out of nowhere, a small kingdom SE of the Caspian Sea. it invaded the Greco-Roman world gigantically. As with Scythia, just north, the Romans proved unable to address the problem. That can be directly traced to the assassination of Julius Caesar. Caesar was ready to kill both empires in one fell swoop. Instead, after his assassination, his army, the best Rome ever had, turned against itself and against the Roman Republic, ultimately pushing Caesar’s great nephew and adoptive son to become “First Man” (Princeps)

In history, there are calm periods, and periods when all hell breaks loose:

So it was between Romans and the Sassanids (Persia). War would erupt, often because the Sassanids wanted Rome out of Mesopotamia. “Mesopotamia” means between the streams, the Euphrates and the Tigris.  

Historically, monstrous Achaemenid Persia had lurched west, conquering Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Black Sea area, Athens resisted, and defeated the Persian at Marathon (while Sparta played). Something we celebrate to this day. Athens then tried to free Egypt, but was ultimately defeated by Sparta as the hand of Persia (which financed the Spartan fleet). So much for Persia always being innocuous. With its accomplice racist, enslaving, human rights abuser Sparta, Persian plutocracy smashed Direct Democracy durably, for millennia to come (and counting!)

Alexander and his father subdued Greece. That happened only because a resentful Sparta stayed out of the crucial battle. After nine  hours of combat, a charge of Alexander and his cavalry against Thebes’ Sacred Band gave the victory to the Macedonians. Thebes was eradicated, Athens was preserved, and then Alexander destroyed the Persians, going all the way to Afghanistan, India. He had to give up on visiting the Pacific.

Hellenistic successor regimes of Alexander’s empire were in turn defeated by the Parthians, who appeared in the south east corner of the Caspian Sea.

The Parthians exerted military pressure on Rome. From the Greco-Roman point of view, those were invaders of the multi-civilizational Seleucids, successor to Alexander. Julius Caesar was on his last day before going to crush them, when he was assassinated (obviously why he didn’t expect the treachery).

By 224 CE, the Sassanids in turn replaced the Parthians. The Sassanids invaded Armenia, Syria, etc. Rome counterattacked, a Roman emperor was made prisoner…

***

Under Shah Abbas, Iran controlled both sides of the Straits of Hormuz. That didn’t last, but the memory of it perdures… like that of Ottoman control of much of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And, as far as the contributions… the 1001 nights were written in Paris, and the Ottoman made printing unlawful. Right, Francois I of France would send printers to the fire, too, but that didn’t last…

Back to the Present, No Nukes Enforced:

In history, there are calm periods, and periods when all hell breaks loose. Wars between Romans and various Persian empires were separated by periods of calm after major wars.

It’s mechanical: combatants are exhausted, peace treaties are signed, causes of war disappear.

We are entering an age where billions of people, because of climate change, will become refugees. Last time this happened, the climate was also changing for the worse, and the Huns were exerting pressure in the back of all German nations, which tried to flee to within the Roman empire. Gigantic pressure on the Roman border resulted in a breakdown and invasions which destroyed the empire (and much of its economy and population; for example the Vandals invaded and occupied Africa, cutting Rome’s grain supply).

What to do in such a case? The Romans should have projected military force outside of the empire in a timely manner. This is exactly what the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius was doing, when he died (still relatively young). Marcus wanted to create two new Roman provinces, to act as buffer, and domesticate the savage, all too numerous Germans. As Caesar or Augustus, he understood that war was best, far away.

The order of the world cannot stand too many countries with nuclear weapons. Iran is going to find out that even Russia and China understand this (let alone Japan and the EU). There are already too many countries with nuclear weapons. Iranians say they have a right to them too. But those who, in the area, know long term history, will reject that. More than once the Persian Gulf was Persian all around, indeed.   

No nukes?

Yes.

Yes, it will require some efforts. And, by definition, efforts are not always nice. It’s not just a matter of arguing for world government a la Einstein, shooting the breeze, looking good. We have world government. It’s called the UNSC. It’s just a bit messy, right. But better that, than the alternative. Only one way.

No nukes.

Yes.

Patrice Ayme

 

US “Unsuccessful” Wars Are Actually Smart and Performing As Planned

Warning added after getting angry comments on the following essay: the essay below tends to enrage self-proclaimed “liberals”, “progressives”, and mutually declared “democrats”. I know why: basically the essay observes that those poor souls have been so incredibly manipulated that they believe what the establishment wanted them to believe, all the way down to their beating hearts. What credulity was that? The establishment persuaded their naive followers that sometimes the US “got bogged down in war”… when that was actually the plan!

And let me insist: it’s not because I am describing a maneuver of sumptuous Machiavellianism… that I approve of it.

***

One silly notion is that of the US conducting “unsuccessful wars”. Like which one was “unsuccessful”? The one against the Indians, eradicating them all? Oops, so sorry we killed you all, but thanks for the continent? Was that unsuccessful? Vietnam? The  US is now, de facto, allied to Vietnam (against you know whom). The war against Iraq from 1990 to 2003? Why would the war have been unsuccessful in Iraq, from the US point of view? Because the Iraqis don’t sell enough oil and gas to make US frackers grossly unprofitable? Quite the opposite, obviously! Afghanistan? Keep your enemies closer and in a state of complete degeneracy, test ever more sophisticated weaponry in real war conditions… How unsuccessful is that?

Contrarily to legend, the USA, as a nation is exactly where it wants to be, militarily. Economically, Trump is forcing US plutocrats out of China. Slowly, but surely. That’s also strategic. We don’t want this below to happen again… This time without back-up! (The US was the backup of France, everybody knew it in France in 1940… Although German and French fascists may have hoped, due to US careful designed “isolationism”, that time, the world war of 1939, was going to be different… )

This French B1 tank was destroyed by its crew (so it would be useless to the Nazis). May 1940

In 1936, France did a huge mistake: instead of going to war in Spain, as the Republic there, attacked by the Nazis (and Spanish and italian fascists), had requested, France listened to the perfidic Anglo-Saxon plutocracy from London and Washington… who had ordered France to stand down. Thus, after all, France, led by the Jewish Socialist PM Blum, didn’t intervene.

Consequence: in the week following May 10, 1940, it turned out that the vastly superior Franco-British forces didn’t function correctly, in part because of a number of relatively small, easy to correct, problems the French and British military were unaware of (no radio in tanks, no communications with air forces, no combat-trained pilots… and the surprise of having an enemy on speed, methamphetamines, who never slept).

By the time the French and British military adjusted to the reality of combat in 1940, a week later, 70 crack French divisions were encircled, cut out of supplies, France and Britain had lost the battle of France.

Morality: When confronted by enemies, it’s better to fight them, than ignore them. If nothing else, it keeps the training up, prevents surprises like May 1940. If France had intervened in Spain in 1936, maybe an unending low key war with Nazism would have started. It would have been better than the alternative…. A Holocaust (100 million killed, about 5% of world population), followed by the so-called “American Century”… we are more in the “American Century” than ever. Whereas France and Britain were allied and competitors of the USA in 1940, now they are just the US little helpers.

So what is next in strategy? Strategy is what decides the world, after all. Most of the French hated the Nazis, until the end of June 1940. After that, though, confronted to two million Nazi soldiers residing in France, they had to show respect. While the Nazis (and their US plutocrat helpers) killed 50 million Europeans, the US Deep State chuckled.

After the Macedonians occupied Athens, having defeated her in war, they established a plutocracy, which, arguably, lasted thousands of years. Things would have been completely different, Direct Democracy would have survived, had Athens not lost these two naval battles.

The USA understands now that it better be allied to France: the stakes have got much higher. Great, or Little Britain is not dependable anymore: watch the ridiculous Brexit. Germany, Japan are still trying to figure out what it all means, and how dependable they themselves are… Not that France doesn’t have a few things to figure out, either.  Like the USA, it may soon discover globalization was not a friend: whereas France is number one military power in Africa, it’s only seventh in trade… In other words, the French… and the Americans… are protecting increasingly Chinese interests in Africa… How strategic is that. By the way, I am pro-Chinese, my daughter is studying Chinese since pre-K.

But I also know that messes of contradictory entanglements bring war.

Take Iran: a fascist theocratic state, which provides Europe with energy. And a state where even the secular population believes it should have nukes. That will not happen: at the next attack against tankers, especially if Iran renounces the nuclear accord of 2015 with Obama (and four other nations, including UNSC permanent members), there will be a military strike.

But remember 1936: sometimes, a little military act goes a long way, a bit like a vaccine…

Conclusion:

The US did NOT get “bogged down” in ANY war since 1776 CE. Quite the opposite: all those wars boosted US power ever more. [1]

The only existential crisis was earlier, when Jamestown came close to extinction after 1610 CE. By 1625 CE, when tobacco started to bring revenue, thanks to newly introduced slavery and addiction (in Europe), it was clear sailing.

France got seriously bogged down in war with Germany, from around 1750 CE until not just 1945, but arguably, to this day (very low key now, as Germany has a regime similar to France, now)… Although some the roots of the Franco-German go back to the Fifth Century… or even Julius Caesar

France had to militarily confront the Nazis in 1936. Or then, much less favorably, go fight them alone with Czechoslovakia as only Ally, in 1938. In both cases, US plutocrats, who wanted Nazism to grow into a Franco-British destruction machine, successfully manipulated the French to dissuade them to declare war…

It is in the best interest of the US Wall Street-Petrodollar-Fracking establishment to shut down the Persian Gulf, and then to have it re-open thanks to the heroic efforts of the Americano-Franco-British military… Japan and others will have to be grateful…

Cynical plans don’t stop there. The self-sufficiency of the US in fossil fuel, and now even exportation, was not a Trump realization, but the work of Obama and his National Security Adviser, Susan Rice (who was personally invested). At this point, the CO2 crisis is carefully groomed as an other cause of delightful (in the sense of increased US power) wars to come. [2]

Patrice Ayme

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[1] As “power” is revered in the USA, this observation of mine, that US wars were profitable to the USA, is enough to enrage the pseudo-liberals, pseudo-progressives. Indeed, if I am right, they are wrong (at least, wrong as seen from the perspective of in their own minds). What is going on here? Listen to Tulsi Gabbard, four term Congresswoman from Hawaii who served years in the US military, and tried to help Assad. She poses as “anti-war”. However, she is FOR… handguns. In other words, she is all for US citizens killing each other: power at its best. She sees nothing wrong, intrinsically, with great wealth, either: cult of power again.  So, if you tell these people wars increased US power, they hate you, because they are supposed to hate war, but also to revere the US (hence its power).

***

[2] The US is in the best position to maximize the crisis of the biosphere… and maximize the profits it will bring. That’s the plan. Obviously, most US citizens know this, intuitively, with their 20 tons of Co2 per capita, per year, and know enough to know that they shouldn’t know more. So they focus on Trump’s hairdo, and Trump’s tweets.

BERATING VIOLENCE DOESN’T HEAVENS BRING

BERATING ALL And ANY VIOLENCE IS BERATING ALL And ANY MEANS OF POWERFUL ACTION AGAINST INFAMY, HENCE DEEPLY INHUMAN:

Violating truth can’t bring good, except when there is no hope. Denying the reality, the inevitability of violence, the essence of Homo, is, at best, a manipulation, at worst the death of any hope of improving matters significantly.

Let me try to explain the pitfall of claiming that violence will stop, if we just stop thinking about it. Quite the opposite.

We are witnessing the greatest violence against the biosphere in 66 million years. And we are culprit, down to baby diapers and poisonous elements in electric batteries. How did we come to that?

Violence actually characterizes the genus Homo’s activities. Turning a wild planet into one’s own garden… required some considerable violence in one’s gardening….

“One must cultivate one’s garden”, said Voltaire, naively enough (until one realizes he was Louis XV’s boyfriend… at which point his advice takes a sinister, self-serving aspect, contemplate his castle, his private hotel on the Seine, facing Notre Dame). Diabolical enough an advice, my dear Voltaire: we are cultivating the garden to death. Tricky herbicides such as glyphosate, used on much of the planet, don’t just kill herbs, they kill soils, for ever, and even the plants malefic scientists have engineered to resist them will ultimately die from impoverished soil.

***

Sade Was A Genius, And A Saint, Sartre Was A Fool, And A Collabo: 

Sade, of course, spent most of his life in prison, sent there first by Louis XVI’s monarchy and then Napoleon’s tyranny… meanwhile saving thousands during the Revolution. Sade saved even his most vicious personal enemy’s life during the Revolution, because he had thought in depth about the nature of human violence, and thus, knew how to resist it. 

Jean-Paul Sartre was viewed by many, or, at least, the French, as a master thinker. He didn’t spend one day in prison: the authorities always viewed him as their friend, and he was. De Gaulle, idiotically enough said, speaking of Sartre:”One doesn’t jail Voltaire!” Hey, mon general, precisely, one imprisons Voltaire! Sartre was not jailed, precisely because he was a collabo….

Sartre wrote:

« La violence, sous quelque forme qu’elle se manifeste, est un échec. »

(“Violence, in whatever form it manifests itself, is a failure.”) This is viewed as one of Sartre’s master ideas… Master thinkers should utter master ideas they created themselves. Nevermind that, wherever we look at the planet, we see invaders who successfully colonized. Even in Greenland, the present inhabitants annihilated the preceding ones… who used to trade with the Vikings, all the way to extreme North Greenland (so the present “native” Greenlanders” replaced in the last 6 centuries both types of preceding inhabitants…)  It goes without saying that colonization, and especially invasion, is pretty violent…

Amusingly, this astoundingly stupid statement of Sartre is not original, being a 2,000 years old leitmotif of Christianism. One could even view the idea of violence as failure as the master idea of christianism: god is crucified, because god doesn’t want to use violence against His persecutors. So we see, just here, that Sartre, and his admirers, far from being revolutionary, are just plain old Christian, serving us the same old same old, without super hero god attached.

An Internet outlet called Cohérence loved Sartre do-goodism and tweeted it:

“Violence, in whatever form it manifests itself, is a failure.”

Jacques Attali , a friend of mine, and a famous adviser to many a major statesman and institutions in Europe sharply criticized the notion:  “Ah? Et la résistance contre les nazis, ce fut un échec ? Il est vrai que Jean-Paul Sartre fut largement absent de ce combat là. Quoiqu’en disent ses thuriféraires.” (Ah? And the resistance against the Nazis was a failure, was it a failure? It’s true that Sartre was mostly absent from that fight. Whatever his sycophants say.”

To kill Nazism, one killed 5.5 million Nazi soldiers, in the Wehrmacht alone. Helpers, not just in Gestapo, Polizei, but also from millions of collaborating troop also had to be killed with the entire German economy, which was so militarized Nazis had to steal most French output.

Humanity is all about violence. Hydroelectricity is generally viewed as “green”, “sustainable” power. In truth it causes enormous, hyper violent damage on the planet hydraulics. Contemplate the picture above. For scale, the dam wall is 221 meters tall (726’). It can release an astounding 11,000 tons of water, per second… More massive than the Eiffel tower… at a speed of 70 meters per second (200 kilometer an hour).

Here, have it in French, Sartre: La réussite, de quelque manière qu’elle se manifeste, est une forme de violence à l’égard de certaines formes pré-existantes. Refuser la violence sous toutes ses formes, c’est refuser l’humanité. Et donc pourquoi les dictatures demandent des moutons, pour achever leur inhumanité. Shortened translation: Success, however its nature, is violence against pre-existing forms. To reject violence under all and any form, it’s to reject humanity. 

***

Denying Violence Exists, is enabling violence:

Some will say that believing violence to always be a failure is a wish, if we all believe in it, it would come true. No harm done, let hope rule the minds.

The problem with that approach is that it equates to saying that, if we should hope to run head first in a brick wall, that will not hurt, if we all believe this.

And what brick wall is that? Homo is both sheep and wolf. The wolves eat the sheep. And if there are only sheep, the wolves will arise. [1] Human genetics and epigenetics, human ethology, is the wall of reality. The very motivating principle of Homo is not curiosity, which compels the eye, but violence, which enables us to move. To go down from the tree and venture into the savannah an ape is not made for, was a violence against nature, the ape, the order of things. It took more than curiosity, it took the infliction of force… and that is exactly the definition of violence.

The best and most human progress Homo has made in the last 5 million years, among its different species, has been propped by the same curiosity enabled by violence. Five million years, 200,000 generations is plenty of time to enshrine behaviors genetically. Moreover, as Homo was a murdering success during those 200,000 generations, physically eliminating the Untermenschen, the sous-hommes, the low lives, the genetic pressure was intense: types which were not curious or violent enough were eliminated.

The end result is a very curious and very violent species.

I have walked dozens of miles, deep in dessicated canyons among the corpses of millennial trees… All the water having long been sent to Los Angeles by elaborate tunnels hundreds of miles long through towering ranges… Yes, the most violent species which ever was. Violence, of course doesn’t have to mean vicious. Unfortunately it often does.

***

Can’t stop to the parents? Punish the child: seen and personally experienced in Spring 2019:

I had an excellent example in my personal life in the last two months: we presented our concerns about toxic chemicals, and other carcinogenic substances, and microplastics to the relevant administration. We were worried that the lives of hundreds of small children in two different elementary schools (starting in pre K) might be threatened, and exactly why. We reviewed thousands of pages of primary scientific and engineering and distilled that down to 100 pages or so. We offered non-toxic, or mitigating alternatives.

Instead of having a dialogue about our concerns, the relevant administration informed us that if we spoke of this with anyone, including trustees, our daughter, nine year old, would be thrown out of school, immediately. And so she was.

I have way higher moral standards than that: if the nine year children of Goebbels or the most vicious jihadist attended school, I would kindly teach them… Maybe I would teach sternly, but I would teach them… and never punish them for the acts of their parents. But here I was confronted with young punks in charge of a school, and, because they dine with Bill Gates, Macron and their ilk, all they need to know is which way money is flowing, and that we were in the way, making us most maleficent, in their greedy eyes of the ultimately connected.

Interestingly, as we resisted the infamy of the conspiring vicious greedsters, increasingly violent methods were used by those who wanted to submit us. Outrageous lies, in print… False accusations of violence, were instigators turned perpetrators were presented as victims, etc.

***

Gandhi was naive about violence. The price has been heavy, worse is to come, potentially:

At that point, some will brandish Gandhi, often presented, ironically enough, as the epitome of non-violence. Gandhi “non-violence” was just violence by other means, and it worked because the British would have self-defeated by using greater violence in India. While Gandhi pressed the Indian Congress to not declare war to his friend Hitler, in 1939, the British Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared India’s entry into the World War without consulting prominent Indian Congress leaders who were just elected in previous elections.

Gandhi launched a movement against fighting the Nazis, although the latter’s atrocities had become blatant. In 1942, him and 60,000 of his followers were imprisoned for the duration (Gandhi was freed in 1944 for ill health). Meanwhile, the Muslim institutions in India enthusiastically supported the British war effort. Muslims constituted 40% of the huge Indian 2.5 million men army. That and the Indian armament industry stopped the Imperial Japanese drive into South Asia.

Thus India properly applied violence during WWII, in a way that advanced civilization… however Gandhi’s hypocritical pro-Nazism fed the split with the Muslims which led to civil war and the creation of Pakistan (and its potential nuclear Armageddon). [2]

***

To be human is to be violent…

Even if it’s one plastic diaper at a time, or one load of detergent laden wash at a time, or one South Asia trip, from the other side of the planet, at a time… Tourism, with present polluting technology, is still violence, as far as the biosphere is concerned.

Violence is all over, it’s a psychological attractor. Consider the death penalty: it was excusable when jails were not very much available (say 2,000 years ago). However, nowadays, life imprisonment is much more effective. Yet the USA, for example still kills (and not just Bin Laden, who was silenced, even more than Saddam Hussein…)

By advertizing that some acts should be punished by death of the perpetrator, society promotes the idea that killing is sometimes best, the crucial belief murderers need to murder in the first place.

***

So, what to do?

Face the music, the music of Homo. Understand that intelligence is violence, understand that some violence is good to have (say, to crush the Nazis). And that other forms of violence have to be absolutely avoided. When millions of protesters went into Hong Kong’s streets, they were violent, the government whined. Right. But it was even more violent to decide to send suspects to be judged by the other system, a violation of the spirit of the accord of re-integration of Hong Kong into the PRC… The violence of the protesters was arguably greater, just as the violence of opposition to Nazism was, by some measures, greater than the violence of the Nazis. The same holds for Hiroshima and Nagasaki: violent. sure, but two orders of magnitude less than what the Japanese military imposed on the rest of the world.

The calculus of violence optimizes it, from very careful studying, and thinking… and it’s crucial to determine for which ultimate aims. Optimal calculus of violence what humanity, at its best, does. Berating violence, to the point of ignoring it, is a cop-out, a strategy to avoid the most important debates. Violence is unavoidable, in any case. And, looked at it the right way, we are living in the most violent times. Ever. [3]

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In some species of fish, when there are only females left, some turn into males, and even super-males. Humans are the same; with too many human sheep around, some will turn into wolves… So it is, from deep seated evolutionary safeguards… 

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[2] Gandhi’s hypocritical pseudo-pacifism is reminiscent of the US Congress similar posing at the time.

***

[3] Plutocratic sycophants such as Pinker have claimed we lived in the best of all possible times. Their ignorance of the ultimate violence of biosphere destruction is not just immoral, it’s going to turn Armageddon into reality, pretty soon.

Sun, Violent Stars, And Their Superflares

In the Chinese blockbuster movie “Wandering Earth“, the Sun goes red giant, and then Jupiter has a gravity spike (as the Earth swings by). Could it happen? According to today’s official physics, no. According to my own Sub Quantic Physics Reality (SQPR), yes. [1] Established scientists may smirk. However, smirking by established scientists or thinkers about imaginable science or thinking, all too often just exhibit their limited understanding of their own lack of understanding, and, or, imagination. 

A problem for our future conquest of the galaxy is that most stars are unstable Red Dwarves. I have argued it means we should be able to find lots of planets with very primitive life, as the most sophisticated type of life would be periodically eradicated. The past is hard to predict… except now we can look at it, with powerful telescopes… and read it.

Stars explode. Stars do also plenty of smaller, more sustainable flares and conflagrations…. The mass extinction level kill radius of a supernova (above) is at least ten light years. But to kill life in a solar system, a star can do, with much smaller explosions: the Earth is only 8 light minutes from the Sun…

When US astronauts went to the Moon, they found traces of a scorching superflare… so dreadful an idea, nobody evokes it anymore…

Studies by the US Kepler space telescope of  solar-type (G-type main-sequence), combined with Apache Point Observatory (APO) 3.5 m telescope spectroscopic observations and the European space telescope show that stars as old and sedate as the sun undergo “superflares”. Working from a sample of about 90,000 Sun-like stars, the researchers identified more than 1,000 superflares from about 300 stars.

The researchers thought these stars would be  rotating rapidly. Quickly spinning stars tend to have strong magnetic fields that easily get tangled up, bunching up, which is thought to kick off flares. However, a fast spin is apparently not a requirement for strong eruptions. Combining their brightness data with radius estimates from the Gaia satellite, the researchers were able to determine how fast their flaring stars were spinning. As expected, stars that rotate once every few days had superflares about 20 times as powerful as more slowly spinning stars like the Sun, which rotates about once every 25 days. However, Sun-like stars were still seen producing hazardous superflares.

A superflare could destroy lots of electronic on Earth (and adversely affect space explorers). Thus, the Sun has to be studied much more.

In September 1859, a solar flare sent a wave of charged particles washing over our planet. It triggered one of the most powerful geomagnetic storms ever recorded: the Carrington Event. As the particles slammed into Earth’s protective magnetic field, they triggered beautiful aurorae that stretched as far south as Hawaii and Cuba. But the Carrington Event didn’t just produce pretty lights in the sky. It also wreaked havoc on telegraph networks spread across North America and Europe. In fact, there are reports of the cosmically overcharged telegraph lines starting fires and shocking telegraph operators during the event.

Explosive activity on sun-like stars is tied to their age, and their rotation. The older, and the slower the rotation, the less explosive. Superflares with energies 5 × 10^34 erg occur on old, slowly rotating Sun-like stars (P rot ~ 25 days) approximately once every 2000–3000 yr, while young, rapidly rotating stars with P rot ~ a few days have superflares up to 10^36 erg.

That would mean energies 500 times that of the Carrington event… which was only 10^32 ergs… and would still be devastating today…[2]

In any case, constant disasters out there in space is my solution to the “Fermi Paradox” (evoking the aliens, “Where is everybody?”, joked Enrico, once at breakfast in the 1950s…)

40 BILLION EARTHS? Yes & NO.

And the more we look, the more we see how true that seems…

Philosophically speaking, that implies life on Earth we are busy destroying is much more of a miracle than is generally felt: watch all the plastic, all over, all the fossil fuels burned, etc…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In SQPR, Dark Matter can be lumpy (also an experimental fact). Also, it influences inertia and other forces, including gravity (hence Dark Energy). So crossing a Dark Matter lump may affect all forces. A gravity spike inside the Sun would cause high mass nuclides to fuse, as happen in Red Giant, or Supernovas…

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[2] Most powerful supernova found: 10^ 45 ergs per second, or 10^ 38 watts, or 30 times the energy of the entire giant Milky Way (which is larger than Andromeda). So the most powerful flares are a billion times less powerful… But they tend to be directed in a particular direction… Mars lost its atmosphere from solar flares…

 

French, Mandarin, Indo-European Languages; Why Multilingualism Brings Higher Wisdom

Multilingualism is a basic human capability, long honed by biological evolution. It may be necessary to achieve the highest mental capabilities, as multilingual speakers learn to adjudicate between modes of expression, the most advanced form of thinking.

So which languages? Excellent article by my frenemy Mehdi Lazar, summarizing well most of the situation with French:”The New Dynamic of French In The World.”. To point out that French and Mandarin are the most important languages (with English, de facto lingua franca) is crucial. Indeed, French is basically the core language of Europe: it is grammatically impoverished Latin bastardized with German prepositions, where many words have been phonetically and alphabetically simplified from the Latin originals. English was an afterthought. French is a fast evolving language (hopefully to go with fast minds).

This understates reality: for example North Africa spoke Latin for 900 years before the Arab invasion. Modern Latin, that is French, is widely understood, practiced and spoken in the Maghreb (in spite of efforts by local dictators of Islamist inspiration to kill it). Africa, light green, has to speak Latin derived languages (including English), because there are way too many native languages (or slave derived languages like Swahili)

Compare say the French “opital” from the original Latin “hospitalis”… English, which is actually more conservative than French, is in between with “HoSpital”: the H and S are still pronounced in English, not in French. The french found that the aspired H in the beginning, the S in the middle, and the “IS” at the end, were all useless, so they dropped them!

English, although technically classified as a “Germanic” language is mostly poorly pronounced French, and the more so, the more sophisticated the vocabulary is (85% + of words in common). Naturally, per its central position in Western Europe, French is then a happy medium between English and the other “romance” languages.

Now the baby elephant in the porcelain shop is that unruly child of Great Britain and France, the USA. Ironically enough, the dreaded “Anglo-Saxons” contribute to French by often going back to the Latin, that is, the original French, and creating words that way.

Here is an example: impact. The word appeared in English circa 1600, for “press closely into something,” from Latin impactus, past participle of impingere “to push into, drive into, strike against”. The word appears in French science and technological vocabulary only in 1824. But not just that, it’s an extremely important word, as it expresses the transmission of force (= how things act upon each other). Thus, in US English it has come to be used, since the 1990s as a… verb. As in: this essay impacts linguistics hard.

Thus it’s only a matter of time before the French verb “impacter” appears… and it would be a very useful verb… created as words should be created in French, going to the original Latin.

Another view: this time more of Africa shows up. Erroneously, but it’s a traditional error, English is not viewed as a Greco-Roman language (although it is fundamentally Greco-Roman, with more than 85% sophisticated words basically French…

Multilingualism is natural, humanity evolved as multilingual: our brains are made to learn several languages, and it enables us to better learn to adjudicate thoughts and forms of expression.

How so? Transportation was extremely difficult in the world of the past, except in those few places with steppe (like the Eurasian steppe, which goes from Hungary to Korea, that enormous freeway in the middle of Eurasia). Thus people evolved many languages even over very short distances. An example is Senegal: in this small countries, seven languages evolved, and some are tonal (Serer) and others not (Wolof). This is typical of the past, so human beings had to be multilingual.

However, there are only that many languages one can learn: French and Mandarin are the great linguistic anchors of the world, a continent apart.

But not just this: except for deplorable episodes such as the ephemeral collapses of the Greco-Roman and Chinese states under the invasions of various savages, Western Europe and China have long been at the forefront of civilization, spearheading progress. Learning basic Chinese arithmetic is fascinating: the Chinese found more rational ways to do it.

The state of Qin and the contemporaneous Roman Republic were remarkably based on the same principles of law, reason and technological progress… and that’s why they founded great empires (alive and well to this day, as descendant regimes). Actually the present inchoate world government embodied by the United Nations rests on Roman Republican legal principles, or even the letter of the Roman law (that’s similar to the Qin obsession with law… which was even applied to one of its most ardent proponent, a famous Qin PM who finished quartered by horses, as the law prescribed for the sort of corruption he had unfortunately engaged in…)

China understood the importance of intellectualism (the “Mandarin” examination system) and science… And that is why China was so successful, and the anchor civilization of East Asia (Japan and Vietnam used to employ Chinese character… Although the French switched Vietnam, and japan evolved a bit on its own…) Thus, from all this will to advanced thinking, China invented many technologies the world uses now. Even in the Nineteenth Century, Chinese drilling for natural gas, one kilometer down, or more, was the world’s most advanced.

The Frankish empire, both Merovingian and Carolingian, soon renamed itself “Renovatio Imperium Romanum”. Indeed, it “renovated” Rome on way better principles: no more terrorizing, stupidifying, sordid Christian fanaticism… and, soon enough, no more slavery: Saint Queen Bathilde outlawed the slave trade in 655 CE… Throughout much of Western Europe. So when the Franks invaded England in 1066, they freed the 20% of slaves there. These philosophical changes had huge economic, social and military impacts… 

Thus learning French and Mandarin is not just about speaking what many speak, and will speak. It’s about learning what made civilization what it has become… including learning the grave errors which made it so much better.

The “mission civilisatrice” is not over, it’s just starting. It’s not just a matter of feeling, and being, superior, it’s a matter of surviving. And not just for this species, but for the entire biosphere. You all will learn to think better, or you will learn to die, sordid. Go multilingual!

Patrice Ayme