FTL: Faster Than Light Communications Don’t Violate Causality

Many physicists take for granted that if Faster Than Light (FTL) communications were possible some signals could be received earlier than they have been emitted. That’s not correct. “Proofs” that Faster Than Light would demolish causality rest on a confusion between causality and temporality. Time is affected by motion, causality isn’t.

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LIGHT/GRAVITY OBSERVED SIMULTANEOUSNESS OF EVENTS IS SPEED DEPENDENT:

Let’s call the Fast Frame FF and the Inertial Frame IF. The great result of Poincaré is that if a clock in Inertial Frame is accelerated to Fast Frame, once it sits still in FF, it will run slow (it’s called the “Twin Paradox”). 

Henri Poincaré pointed out as early as 1898 (Einstein was 19), events which are VIEWED AS simultaneous in the Fast Frame FF may not be VIEWED AS so in the Inertial Frame IF  depending on the exact motion of FF. (If light behaved as sound, it would be obvious why: sometimes sound takes longer to catch up. It’s basically the same mathematical idea.)

The fact events look simultaneous, or not, depends upon defining simultaneity with light speed, and that c is finite. The sketch above is ROUGHLY correct… But not really, because it contains implicitly a subtlety which needs to come to the fore to be fully correct: the LOCAL time inside the train is NOT the same as the LOCAL time on the platform watching the train… so the detail of the drawing is not as simple as the first sketch… But the basic concept remains: light will be seen as hitting the left side of the carriage first if the carriage is moving towards the right…

It’s very simple. Let’s visualize IF and FF the former as a train station, the second as a train, rushing by. Consider the two extremities of a carriage, A and B, call M the middle of the carriage. Then shine a light at M. From inside the carriage, one can see (say by reflecting the light on mirrors), that the light arrived at A and B simultaneously. 

However, from the outside, as seen from the Inertial Frame, the train station, as the carriage is going towards M, the light is going to hit A first, and B, later. 

The proof rests only on the speed of light being finite (something we have known since studying the moons of Jupiter in the Seventeenth Century. 

So simultaneousness of events having to do with light as defined in the Inertial Frame will be different from simultaneousness of events having to do with light in the Fast Frame… As seen with light!  The order of some events may appear one way in IF, and the opposite in FF. If one defines causality as temporal ordering, one is lost. All of this was discovered by Henri Poincaré… and probably why Henri proposed to call this “the theory of relativity”… Relativity of light events as seen by light. All very enlightening, but all too light.

Now here is a philosophical question: suppose we have an instantaneous way to communicate when things are happening. Would that redefine simultaneity? Of course. now in the real world, spacetime is curved, and light goes neither straight, nor constantly, and may even not go anywhere at all:

Spacetime is curved, and in other words, light is neither straight nor constant. More precisely this means that parallel transport along a ray of light brings a rotation of frames. Also shrinkage in various dimensions.

At first sight, physics locked the notion of time down. Indeed, at first sight…. we have only two long range interactions: gravity and electromagnetism (light). Moreover because of Energy = Mass (Henri Poincaré, 1899, La Sorbonne, Paris), they go at the same speed.

At second sight, we have Quantum Entanglement… Yes, I know, many physicists say Quantum Entanglement can’t be an interaction, because it would go faster than light, and that would violate causality. They may as well quote the Bible… It’s faith on their part, and dogma, not science…

Moreover, time, as defined by light clocks is only local, a notion living in the tangent space to spacetime. An explicit illustration of that is local time in a GPS satellite is not Earth time, and modifications to clocks have to be made constantly.

In this real world, defining time only with light is not the only problem. Wait, some will say, do you have any better than light and gravitation to tell us of distant events? Of course, we do: Quantum Entanglement. In my vision of the matter, matter, and space are literally created by Quantum Entanglement. And that goes at a faster clip than electromagnetism and gravity, or things would fall apart.

Patrice Ayme

Biden Real Story

What is Biden’s story which is never told?

That as a very young “Democratic” Senator, Biden helped pass Reagan’s plutocratic globalist legislation in the 1980s? [0].

That Biden passed the laws which sent millions of minorities to prison in the 1980s? I know the case of a Black gentleman who was sent to prison for life for holding some drug paraphernalia. He has three children. It took years of efforts on the part of my spouse and the intervention of the friend, the president (Obama), to get him out.

Is Biden going to tell us the story of how, as head of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, he invented the myth of Iraq having Weapons of Mass Destruction? So not only did Biden vote to invade Iraq, he championed the destruction of the country. After six months of efforts, Bush adopted that myth, and this enabled Bush to invade Iraq, killing millions of people on the other side of the planet: reality overwhelms fiction, now US so-called “liberals” love that guy, Biden, who made all that mayhem possible [1].

Why so much admiration for the Biden led invasion of Iraq from the so-called, self-described “liberals”? Do “liberals” love that Biden “liberated” millions of Iraqi souls? Does that satisfy his accomplice in war crime Nancy Pelosi, third personage of the USA, who evokes the Bible continually? Is Biden so admired because they were told that was an admirable feat, an invasion that would make America great? Can self-described “liberals” imagine such an absurdity, or are they too scared? Or do they oppose Trump because Trump opposed the invasion of Iraq?

And what of Obamacare? It made healthcare more expensive and unattainable for most, and the proof is, life expectancy in the USA has been on a nose dive, for several years now, as never before… And still, plenty of Obama admirers, and many Biden admirers, lauds Obamacare, calling it a signature achievement.

Is Biden going to tell us how Obama’s push for fracking made the US the greatest producer of oil and gas that ever was? While being viewed as most ecological?

Is Biden going to tell the story of his herculean feats, raising monopoly powers and inequality to heights never seen before? How wealthy donors were rewarded shamelessly? [2].

Mass delusion pushed that far is the ultimate horror, and devastation.

War criminal in action, for all to see. Senate Foreign Relations Com. Chairman Joe Biden Bringing The Hammer Down On Iraq: let’s kill whatever number of Iraqis we need to kill to stop Iraqi Oil production, so we will increase the price of oil, thus increase US fracking, and please Wall Street and nice billionaires (whom it’s so good to know). Somebody’s gotta do it. What do you think of my WMD trick, dear George? When one brings the subject up with masturbating “liberal Americans” these days, they scoff, and say it was long ago. So was Von Ribbentrop, the nazi Foreign Minister, who was hanged for only one charge: misleading everybody, including Hitler, to make the war of aggression against Poland possible.

Those creatures have had too much power, for too long, to still be fully human.

Voting for Biden will be a moral choice. It’s also an epistemological, a cognitive test. Many democrats I talked to told me it didn’t matter whether Biden is a war criminal, or not. Do they even understand what they are saying? No.

Biden Real Story: Serving The Worst. Forty years of public disservice to prove it. Some have said to my face that it doesn’t matter how many millions Iraqis were killed. But, to me, it does matter to confront Nazism and Nazi like creatures, ready to trample the world to satisfy their greed for power.

Patrice Ayme

***

[0] Obama viewed as an electoral argument to express how much he admired Reagan… ourse it’s difficult to explain to Obama voters that Reagan was bad for them. But Reagan was deeply bad: he is the one who launched, as governor of California, tuition for PUBLIC universities…

Trump fought Reagan about globalization, in the 1980s (even starting a presidential campaign). Just as the 1920s and 1930s with Germany, Italy and Spain, even Japan, globalization of giant US companies enabled said companies to evade US legislation while making deals with dictators. One result was Hitler, and various local tin pots dictators, even Stalin. Another now has been encouraged and fortified, same method, same effect, the Chinese dictator Xi.

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[1] Here is Joe Biden, as Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002: “In my judgment, President Bush is right to be concerned about Saddam Hussein’s relentless pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and the possibility that he may use them or share them with terrorists,” Biden said at an August 2002 hearing.

“These weapons must be dislodged from Saddam Hussein, or Saddam Hussein must be dislodged from power…”

***

[2] When Biden was Vice President, his boss, Obama, engaged enthusiastically in the time-honored tradition of hooking up his major donors, giving ambassador posts to 31 “bundlers” who raised at least $50,000 for his campaign. That insured that those individuals would be nice to Obama in Obama’s present career, begging right and left for crumbs from plutocrats and their organizations.  Almost all of these ambassadorial posts were “in Western European nations or other highly developed and stable countries such as Canada and New Zealand,” according to the Center for Public Integrity (including large powers such as France, where som plutocrat was sent). A local wealthy woman (wealthy from marrying a wealthy man) I had been invited at the mansion of, and so was Obama, became ambassador to Switzerland…

Shockingly, but unsurprisingly, several of these ex-ambassadors have been bundling checks for Biden in this 2020 presidential campaign. Having seen this dirty crew at work under Obama sank me into depression at the time. Now I have switched to rebellion, which is much more comfortable.

Biden billionaire backers can only give $2,800 per election per person to the Biden campaign. That’s why toddlers are making gifts (as happened under Obama). Some millionaires are bundling checks from their wealthy friends. But Biden has conveniently flip flopped on super PAC support. So these diabolical Monopoly Men and Women now funnel endless amounts of money into outside ads supporting Biden, sculpting US politics into their thing. Right, it happened in the 1920s and the result was Hitler…. And the advancement of many a US plutocrat whose descendants now pull the string of countless foundations, universities, and secret influencing channels. The super PAC Unite the Country made its first ad buy in the Iowa campaign, for $650,000. Unite the Country is led by corporate lobbyists, consultants, and party fundraisers.

What of Trump, some will lash out, why don’t you focus on Trump? Well, Trump doesn’t pretend to be the opposite of what he is… And he is an excellent weapon, as he fights the globalization the Democrat leaders engineered, starting with Reagan. It’s easier to fight an enemy than a traitor who pretends to be your friend after lying about all what he and his accomplices did, planting all these knives in your back.

Let me repeat slowly. Trump and Biden are persons. In law there is a notion of moral persons (an old French legal notion recently embraced by the US Supreme Court). So a company can be a moral person. Viewed at it that way, globalization itself can be viewed as a moral creature, a moral monster… much bigger than individuals such as Trump or Biden. What is sure is that Trump condemns the eight trillion dollars (he keeps on repeating) spent in the Middle East for no good reason (including the Iraq invasion, mostly done, as I keep on repeating, to bolster the price of oil and making Wall Street’s massive fracking investment possible… under Obama). Trump also condemns the delocalization of industry to China, the exact same trick used in Rome… And the reality is MONOPOLY powers were augmented under Obama considerably. The impeachment surfaced exactly when a deal had been made with Congress to attack the MONOPOLY problem, and its patent aspect. It cannot be possibly a coincidence.

Trump should evoke the Defense Procurement Act to re-established the Patent System demolished by Obama. it is a question of national security that inventors can be rewarded for their inventions. As it is, Monopoly Powers can block any small inventor by stealing their inventions… Obama used to crow about making sure only monopolies could profit from inventions… That killed inventions: inventors had to file in Europe, or China!

***

P/S, More details: The New York Times went on and on about how wise Stephen King was about hating Trump, in a long interview. So I sent a comment (part of it above). It was of course censored (others were allowed to comment on Biden, as long as they sang his praises, or offer very mild critiques). Why do I pay the NYT? Just a multi-decade habit, a drug addiction of mine? Or do I subscribe so that I can see a major newspaper insulting truth, and me? Yes. Studying Pluto propaganda, live. Nothing like it.

Meanwhile a past Biden staffer, Tara Reade, filed against him a sexual assault charge. It is corroborated in multiple ways (including by one Democrat who used to be Tara’s neighbor, and who intends to vote for Biden!) The Pluto Monopoly press has scrupulously ignored the sex attack… although one of the most damning piece of evidence comes from CNN’s Larry King itself! Biden is so impervious to the notion of sexism, he called Kamala Harris, Senator of California, “kid”.

When Biden went to China in an official visit with his son Hunter in November 2013, Hunter was hunting for big money, big like a billion dollars, and Hunter, and Joe, connected with Jonathan Li, a Chinese banker (thus an official of the government). Here is the New York Times in What We Know About Hunter Biden’s Business in China

Hunter Biden has been a member of the board of BHR since it was formed in late 2013.

…in early December 2013 in Beijing. Mr. Biden, who had traveled to China on official business as vice president, met and shook hands with his son’s business associate, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the hotel where the American delegation was staying, according to an account in The New Yorker. The magazine said Hunter Biden had arranged the encounter with Mr. Li, who was headed for a post as BHR’s chief executive…

Several days after the trip, BHR won a business license from the Chinese government…

To raise funds, BHR teamed up with some of China’s leading state-owned financial companies, including its biggest indirect shareholder, Bank of China, as well as China Development Bank and the country’s social security fund, according BHR’s website. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that the firm was seeking to raise $1.5 billion.

“Almost any senior name that I start researching, I run into practices like this. It is extraordinarily widespread,” Sarah Chayes, the author of the book “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,” said in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. “How did we all convince ourselves that this isn’t corrupt?”

Yes, corruption threatens global security: we got the virus from it. (By the way it’s ex French Prime Minister Raffarin, a man who made a fortune in China, who arranged for the P4 lab in Wuhan, the only one in China. So the global corruption dealing with German fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, which the US is presently repeating with the Chinese dictatorship, is now enthusiastic supported by the French… Who had not messed up with Hitler…).

***

Post P/S: The New York Times informed me, after the publication of this present essay and the one before that (which evoked the NYT’s censorship of that particular comment), that my comment was published… 48 hours late, and when nobody will read it, as intended… This way the NYT can claim I was not de jure censored… although I was, de facto, namely the NYT readers didn’t see my comment… This little game has happened hundreds of times…

Stephen King’s Real Horror: He Can’t Face Reality

Stephen King is a famous author of horror stories like “The Shining”. “The Shining” is a well made movie, as most Kubrick movies are, I have seen it a few times (but never voluntarily: I was socially forced). I saw it many times, and I hate the message of that movie. What is elevating and instructive seeing a guy break doors with an axe in a state of rage, trying to kill his family, a weak woman with a child? It would be good, if the maniac had a real reason to be enraged, but he doesn’t. it’s all in his head… As it is, “The Shinning” is a depiction of insanity. If one loves that, to watch senseless, unmotivated insanity, one is ready to watch CNN tell us, for days on end, that the president said the virus was a hoax, suggested to drink Lysol, and aquarium disinfectant (the proof being that a man died this way in Arizona, chuckles CNN). The worst? People swallows that elixir of fake truth as if it were to bring them eternal life.

So here was Stephen King in the New York Times telling to no end how incredibly stupid Trump was, Trump’s lack of writing and speech ability, Trump immense immorality… but never pointing out at specific, reasoned details (thus violating his own protocols for a proper discourse). King made a fortune with his horrible books and atrocious movies’ rights, he is part of the treacherous establishment 100%.

Stephen King: “Part of the problem is that Biden hasn’t had a chance to tell his story… He has been effectively muzzled. But the story that he has to tell is: Do you want somebody who’s capable of dealing with a situation like coronavirus or do you want somebody who’s so focused on his self-image that he’s not able to do that?”

Ironical that King would say this: anybody who has listened carefully to Biden, knows that Biden has some neurological problems…

But all these people of the elite sleep together: Obama gave a medal to Stephen King, just as he gave some to many in the elite, including the Gates to whom he had given a supervisory role for all of US education (although Gates dropped out of the first year of college).

People admire authors of stories about people wanting to kill their family with an axe. Then same author rages against Trump as most immoral and stupid. Wait? Making money out of writing on killing one’s family with an axe makes you a puritanical authority on what is immoral, stupid and debasing?Stephen King thinks Biden had no chance to tell his story?

What’s Biden real story? Hey King, you of the elite, you of the medal from Obama, you of the countless Hollywood movie contracts, you told us in the New York Times that Biden was this super brain. Really?  You know what? I sent a little abstract of Biden’s real story, as a comment to your self-interested diatribe (from the tribe which gives you medals, revenues, etc.). The New York Times to publish it, and, of course they censored it (that should be illegal). Because it was the truth, never fit to print ever since the New York Times, a century ago, thought there were no problem with German racism and Chancellor Hitler (that was the price for the considerable augmentation of the American Empire State building… centered on New York City, as the name indicates…).

This sort of censorship should disqualify the New York Times as official press. A law needs to be passed where de facto distributors of information can’t censor truth. So not just the official press, but also “social networks”… or search engines: all should have to be capable to justify why they censored, under the penalty of law (I have been censored even by Facebook recently for telling the truth about Christianism creating Roman emperors…)

I disjointed my essay in two pieces, and will publish separately the Biden story, uncensored, short, and to the point.

Of all the possible candidates to the US presidency, for a whole number of reasons, Biden is the worst, considering his past achievements, as my Biden Real Story will abstract. The fact Sanders refused to corner Biden about the Iraq invasion which Biden crucially enabled in two ways, proved that the fix was in. In general, the progressive candidates were too progressive by half… As if they were anxious to lose and end up with Biden.

Merchants of nightmares we don’t need anymore: the present pandemics, with its nightmarish return to the methods of the Middle Ages, was greatly due to the connivence between the leadership of the democracies and the Chinese dictatorship.

Patrice Ayme

 

Magnificence of Mind, Kindness, Cosmically Enlightening

Kindness,

A one way stream. 

Is that bitter? Is there better?

Why? What? The greedy will smart.

What’s left of it, if not returned? And they smirk.

Maybe, some will mock, as Caesar, forgiving his lethal enemies?

Forgetting, deliberately overlooking their enmity?

Burning, without looking at it, the damning written evidence,

Of stealthy traitors, lurking in their dark minds,

Pretending to be what they were not,

Documents seized in Pompey’s tent after his defeat,

And ignored…

Magnificence of mind, Plutarch observed,

Who condemned Cicero, Caesar’s plutocratic enemy, for not having it.

10 year old Athena A’s work. Life is a ultimate magnificence enlightening the universe, and it does as it wishes, not as it is

Some will sneer,

What’s the point of magnificence of mind?

How did that work for Caesar? How does it work for us?

Reading and writing, while at the games? Really?

Instead of demonstrating that Caesar was entertained by the vilest human suffering?

Rome couldn’t learn the lesson,

The magnificence Caesar bestowed on it, 

Thus lost everything.

***

You gave and wasn’t the gift enough of a gift, by making it?

For you, who gave it?

Love onto others as they won’t love onto you?

Kindness, a one way stream, knows no other way,

But to give,

Ignoring whether the kindness will be returned or not, 

Yes it can be bitter,

But bitter is the way, bitter is good, it’s a mature, acquired taste,

The cross one has to bear, 

And not because one expects some eternal reward.

Life is a murder most foul, 

Humbling it by creating it better than it really is,

Not just a sweet vengeance. 

Innocents get crushed by large, blind masses,

Yet sometimes luck will come some way,

Neither of which outcomes anybody controls. 

But if kindness you do, 

As a companion with you it will forever stay.

Not much, you say?

What else?

Love?

There too, you can give it,

But if genuine, it’s never an equation,

It’s not that the love you gave, will equal to the one you get,

As the Beatles put it, silly and avaricious.

Learn to give, never to receive,

Learn to be,

What is to be admired. And first by yourself.

Make you that gift,

To be a giver of kindness and love.

***

Even if Caesar never could have his kindness,

For greedy, passionately irrational Cicero, ever returned,

He had the satisfaction of giving to others,

Thus to himself, what they couldn’t return.

The more he gave them, the greater he became,

And the more vile his opponents.

***

Kindness becomes the beholder,

Blossoming magnificence,

In a universe otherwise deprived of it.

Kindness is best,

As a one way stream.

Only then does magnificence

Brings the pleasure,

Of making the universe into artwork,

And the artist is thankful,

Not just for what was given to all,

And the immensity of space,

But also for what the artist became,

And there had never been anything like it.

Bestow kindness,

Not just for what it will give,

But for what it makes you blossom into.

***

Patrice Ayme

 

WHY SEX? Sex Makes Nice, Thus Friends. Hence Augments Power, Individual Life And Pursuit Of Happiness

The theory of why sex evolved is not crystal clear. Consider the article: Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations (complete with frantic paramecium sex movie [1]).

Let the love of wisdom come to the rescue of scientists lost in spurious biochemical effects… They are missing the very big picture, which is actually very simple. Yes, sex enables to repair seriously damaged DNA. If one strand has a gross error, coupling it with a correct strand will erase the mistake. That was obvious ever since the double helix was discovered (and one of the motivations thereof).

But there is also a more general, more philosophical point of view., which one has to take into account.

In higher animals, sex incites individuals to interact in a fundamentally non predatory way: instead of viewing the other only as a competitor, an adversary, or prey, the other can be seen as complementary, and a friend. This way, sex, acting as social attractor and social cement is immediately profitable to the sexually minded individuals. Recent, deeper studies, have revealed that even species which used to be thought as solitary, like orangutans, are not so: the much smaller females interact with males, thanks to their booming voices, at the distance of many kilometers. All together they go one way, in a coordinated fashion.

Paramecia Having Sex. Paramecia can have sex without reproduction, and reproduction, without sex.

Considered this way, sex is not just all about future generations, but also about immediate benefit to the individual. It’s about making friends. Of course it makes the individual smarter, because making friends requires mental ingenuity, thus to exert the brain muscle (so to speak).

Having friends increases one’s longevity. One can defend oneself better when more than one, or many. Being not one, but many, leads the individual to having a lower probability of being consumed. Female orangutans are informed by the males whether the forest in the (slow) direction of travel is safe, for example.  

Some will object that this mechanism sure couldn’t play a role with the most primitive animals. Actually, this is not correct. The more friends, the better, even with the most primitive. For example, bacteria is much more resistant, when in films (all together now). 

The argument that, the more pressed together, the better, applies also in the case of a plausible transition from prokaryotes to eukaryotes, through multicellularity (all the friends pressed together, now). 

Love of the other, is also love of the self, mirrored, or not. Loving the multitude averages as the best way to love oneself.

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S 1: The hypothesis above, that sex was the evolutionary created mechanism to increase sociability in species, also explains homosexuality, and makes it a mechanism facilitating survival.

I am not the first one to get the idea that sexuality, homosexual or not, helped defense. The concept, deliberately engaged, helped bring down Sparta. The Sacred Band of Thebes (Ancient Greek: Ἱερὸς Λόχος, Hieròs Lókhos) was a troop of topmost, best soldiers, consisting of 150 pairs of male lovers which formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC. Thebes, spearheaded by the Sacred Band, ended Spartan domination. Its dominance began with its crucial role in the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, when the Spartan army got broken, fair and square, thanks to a number of innovations on Thebes’part.

The Middle Age European aristocracy invented something a bit similar with the Compagnon d’Armes. For example, Richard The Lionhearted’s Compagnon d’Armes was his suzerain, Philippe Auguste: they trusted each other absolutely, with their lives. When the latter had to return to France he left the former in charge of the army, to deal with Saladin.

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P/S 2: Why was such a simple, perfectly obvious idea, that sex is the essence of sociability, avoided as an explanation of the evolutionary creation of sex before? Probably  because it sounds anthropomorphic: fashioning the universe in the image of humanity. However, that sometimes works; after all, humanity evolved out of the universe, and one of the fundamental driver of why the philosophical approach works is precisely that one learns a lot about the universe by looking inside.

***

P/S 3: Sartre famously said: “L’Enfer, c’est les autres!“. He got it as wrong as wrong can be. L’Enfer ce n’est pas les autres, monsieur Sartre: c’est vous et les vôtres qui le somment. Hell is not others, Sartre. Only in your social, dictator loving circle. Hell is you and your Nazi loving lover. Nazism was a failure, because at the heart of the human, and even animal, enterprise is the mechanism that paradise is the multitude.

***

[1]: From the article: Sex might be biology’s most difficult enigma. The downsides of relying on sex to reproduce are undeniable: It takes two individuals, each of whom gets to pass on only part of their genome. Because these individuals generally have to get fairly intimate, they make themselves vulnerable to physical harm or infections from their partner. Asexual reproduction, or self-cloning, has none of these disadvantages. Clones can be made anywhere and anytime, and they receive the full complement of an individual’s genes.

Yet despite all its benefits, asexual reproduction is the exception, not the norm, among organisms that have compartmentalized cells (eukaryotes).

 

Climate Change and International Transport

We need a hydrogen economy. However, on day one of his presidency, Obama ripped out all financing for hydrogen, including for hydrogen fuel cell research… It became clear later that the boy was advised by the frucking frackers: recently, thanks to Obama (not Trump!), the USA produced 30% more petroleum, 13.3 million barrels a day, than the country which produced the most aside from the USA (Saudi Arabia at its peak)

US fuel cells had enabled the US to go to the Moon (and provided fireworks for Apollo 13). I doubt Barry the Boy knew this (he is best at knowing very little besides how to feed people with what they want to hear).

Here professor Ian Miller, a chemist and physicist of renown, points out that shipping is an ecological disaster (one cruise ship in Marseilles, idling in port, pollutes as much as two million cars at speed limit). And the solution? Hydrogen (or Ammonia, roughly the same, but more civilized)…

Making “green” hydrogen is a must. Just use PV solar panels for energy (or even wind, which I like less). Storing it as ammonia is a no brainer for safe storage and transportation. Actually, last I checked there was such a giant project in North-West Australia to send “green” energy to Japan… Probably to calm the likes of yours truly about Japan’s much more real plan to replace its nuclear industry with Australian coal. So Japan and Australia get financed by states and countries which go clean… while they go fish whales and pollute North America, killing American frogs, smothering the planet… While pretending to go green by killing non-killing nuclear energy.

All boats could use sails, as supplementary power, either as rotors, or the turbosail invented by Cousteau and associates, or even computer controlled kites. Those have not been developed because of the subsidies and tax-free status given to shipping (although full scale prototypes have shown they work.. up to 25% reduction of energy). One can expect considerable reduction in energy demand (also achievable by reducing speeds).

[2018 Viking “Grace”, a 2800 passengers, 500 cars ferry between Finland and Sweden. the single rotor sail on top is supposed to diminish carbon emission by 900 tons a year; the ship is otherwise fueled by natural gas, CH4, which as close to hydrogen as it gets in a naturally occuring fuel… Thus less polluting…]

In any case, just like the fracking Obama, great fracker-in-chief, the Paris accord was self-satisfying hogwash (consider Japan, Germany and their coal reintroduction)… Paradoxically energy guzzling Texas led by rabid “Red” governor Perry (now Trump energy sec.), did way better in going green (lots of wind)… The problem with Paris is that countries are supposed to self-improve, at a pace of their own choosing. The virus is doing better to reduce CO2 production, quicker.

Maybe all we can hope for is to balance one catastrophe by another?

PA

ianmillerblog

You probably feel that in terms of pollution and transport, shipping is one of the good guys. Think again. According to theEconomist(March 11, 2017) the emissions of nitrogen and sulphur oxides from 15 of the world’s largest ships match those from all the cars on the planet. If the shipping industry were a country, it would rank as the sixth largest carbon dioxide emitter. Apparently 90%of trade is seaborne, and in 2018, 90,000 ships burn two billion barrels of the dirtiest fuel oil, and contribute 2 – 3% of the world’s total greenhouse emissions. And shipping is excluded from the Paris agreement on climate change. (Exactly how they wangled that is unclear.) The International Maritime Organization wants to cut emissions by 50% by 2050, but prior to COVID-19, economic growth led to predictions of a six-fold increase by then!

Part of the problem is the fuel: heavy bunker…

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Alien Plutocrat Got US Billions, He Wants More. Because He Is Evil, And Want You To Admire Evil, While You Suffer. Instead, US Should Seize His Tax Free Island!

PLUTOCRACY AT WORK: STRANGLING WE THE PEOPLE TO ENRICH ITSELF SOME MORE, Sadistically!

LIVE AND LET GREED: Branson, Obama, Harvard, Xi: the eternal return of evil greed…

Those who enjoy money or power get quickly used to their presence and will use them to insure they keep the better life to themselves. And they will do anything to do that: as they steal you, and they will feel morally justified to steal beings so inferior, they can’t even defend themselves…

Thus when 350 billions dollars (~4% of normal GDP) became disponible to help small businesses bereft of revenue, Harvard University didn’t hesitate to grab nine million. This was clearly a violation of the intent of the law: helping otherwise bankrupt businesses. Harvard endowment is $40 billion (yes, $40,000 million). Harvard is very far from financially bankrupt, it’s just mentally corrupt.

Trump said “I want Harvard to pay that money back, OK? They have to pay it back, I don’t like it. This is meant for workers, this isn’t meant for one of the richest institutions, not only, far beyond schools in the world. They got to pay it back.” Harvard replied it had already spent the money, and used it well, to rescue its own needy folks! [1] .

Plutocrat, Evil-Rule Branson strangles a masochist submissive US president, who doesn’t mind being manhandled… as long as he makes beaucoup bucks…

Harvard is a top research institution, and some of the research it conducts is most glorious, precious… Harvard is also, thanks to its elite mental status, one of the most evil institutions in the world. Indeed, as many US top academic institutions, it has mostly contributed, in the sociological realm, to make us all believe that its sponsors, the US ruling class, was endowed with the correct ideology. This will be OK with many people, until they understand what happened with Hitler. Harvard’s ideology of greed made Hitler possible. 

It’s not just my opinion, knowing what I know, as the Chicago Tribune put it in 2004:

“Harvard accused of coddling Nazis

Ron Grossman, Tribune staff reporter

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

In a David-and-Goliath rerun, an obscure historian from the academic provinces has challenged Harvard, charging the crown jewel of higher education with providing Nazism an intellectual fig leaf during the run-up to World War II.

Harvard University helped enhance the prestige of Hitler’s regime in the West in the 1930s,” said Stephen Norwood, a history professor at the University of Oklahoma. “This was at a critical period when the Nazis were intensifying the persecution of Jews.”

Norwood was the keynote speaker at a recent conference on the Holocaust in Boston, where he reported finding evidence in Harvard’s archives of footsie-playing with Nazi luminaries, including sending a representative to a Nazified German university and alumni goose-stepping at a reunion.

Of course Larry Summers, a foundation of Clinton and Obama style plutocratic socioeconomiy called the historian “Norwood’s specific allegations appear to be very much open to debate”. 

In 1934 the Harvard Crimson called in an editorial for an honorary degree for Ernst Hanfstaengl, a Harvard alumnus who had become a close confidant of Adolf Hitler. Hanfstaengl was an outspoken anti-Jew and the Nazi dictator’s foreign-press secretary. His wife was intimate with Hitler. Hanfstaengl’s wife had talked Hitler out of suicide when, in a moment of despondency, he put a gun to his head.

True to its century old habit to love fascism and the like, the Harvard Crimson accused Norwood in an editorial of “attempting to gain some name recognition by attacking the American university with the most name recognition.“

 Norwood observed the obvious: anti-Judaism in the U.S. before World War II–a topic bubbling only in public consciousness from novelist Philip Roth’s best seller, “The Plot Against America.” (… a book I own… yet I don’t even remember how much of I read before being bored to tears…)

***

Similarly, “Sir” Richard Branson, owner of Virgin Airways, asked for $600 million… He didn’t strangle Obama enough [2]. On the ground that other airlines got money too (except many of these other airlines are “public” companies; Virgin is only half public, the other half is Branson). Over the years, airlines used their profits to mostly buy their own stock, when they are public companies (apparently 95% of airlines profits were used this way)… So airlines had no financial cushion.

Branson is the 268th richest person in the world with an estimated six billion  paper fortune, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index. Branson founded Virgin Atlantic in 1984 and retains a 51% stake, alongside the US airline Delta with 49%. Now Delta is already getting billions from US taxpayers.  

“Look at this enormous tax-free private island I have got!”, says Richard Branson. “All mine, huge!”: And he adds: You The People have to provide me with more! All of you! Europeans, Americans, British! Give me more! It’s matter of keeping you employed by me! And I shall invite your leaders on my island!

First Branson asked 650 million dollars from the UK government. Then “Sir” Richard Branson said he will mortgage his private Caribbean island to raise money to help his Virgin Group empire, as he pleaded with the UK government to step in and save his Virgin Atlantic airline from collapse. Hey what was the point of bribing the leaders of the West? Former President Barack Obama had the time of his life on his Pluto vacation. 

Branson, who is the UK’s seventh richest person with an estimated £4.7bn fortune, and has lived tax-free on his property, Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands for the last 14 years. After the Obamas were done with their reign, they retired for weeks to Necker Island, to enjoy being served by their “friend” Branson, no doubt rewarding them for their services (Branson enjoys lots of prerogatives in the USA, instead of being just arrested as normal people would be).

Now “Sir” Richard promised in a public blogpost on Monday that he would “raise as much money against the island as possible to save as many jobs as possible”. Why doesn’t “Sir” Richard the Greedy Hearted sell the island outright? Because Obama is his friend, and Biden couldn’t be far behind? Because the island is tax-free? Branson pretends to be a British citizen, as he pretended to be a European citizen… yet he pays no tax, yet he gets subsidies (all airlines get their fuel tax-free, so are subsidized).

Branson, 69, made the pledge as he tried to convince the government to give his airline a £500m loan to help it through the “devastating impact this pandemic continues to have”. “Devastated” we tell you, Branson is. 

Now all of Branson’s wealth was founded on subsidies. To start with, fossil fuel usage kills, at the very least 10 million people a year, and air transportation is a big part of it. If normal citizens do not pay tax, while making millions, let alone billions, they will go to jail for a very long time, and their property will be seized. That’s the case of Branson. He paid no tax. He corrupted the president. So let’s seize his wealth, and send him to prison, for bribing elected officials (just look at the vacation, complete with private jet travel, he offered to the Obamas).[3]

***

In related news faithful reader Ian Miller asks: “The obvious question is why did Milan not close down flights from Wuhan? It is not as if they did not know there was a virus on the loose there. I think your conclusion about the Hubei lockdown might be slightly wrong. Beijing did not know something we don’t, their problem was they simply did not know.”

Well, apparently, the Chinese dictator Xi knew, because he made an alarming discourse to his oligarchic accomplices on January 7… A secret discourse, of course. Not for us virus ravaged plebeians. While secretly alarmed, the dictatorship pretended officially that there was no human to human transmission (individuals claiming the contrary were hounded, arrested, and made to recant, including famous, soon to die, 34 year old, Doctor Li; other prominent whistleblower doctors have completely disappeared.. perhaps undergoing electroshock therapy to cure their derangement?). WHO kept on with the fiction of no danger of pandemic into February. Milan believed one lie too far.

Much European industry can’t function without China. It’s a shame. Pretty much all what is sold in the industrial part of Italy, including famed “Italian” clothing, is Chinese. The active principles of most drugs, including hydroxychloroquine and antibiotics“made” in… “India”…) come from China (97% for generic antibiotics sold in the US). Trump invoked this week the Defense Procurement Act for… cotton swabs… (So far, made in China!)

Now the European “leaders” were anxious to believe the lies coming from the Chinese dictatorship which enrich those who pay the so-called leaders after their “service” (when they self-serve). Also equally anxious to believe the WHO, China’s agent.

***

Ian:”I also think that in this case your argument that democracy is better might be questioned. China has done a better job of constraining the virus that I believe the US will do, looking at the progress so far.“

This assertion depends upon believing in the Chinese dictatorship to start with. There is plenty of evidence that it lied by a factor of ten or even twenty in the number of deaths and people affected.

China lockdowned Chengdu, sixteen million, in Sichuan, west of Hubei, when there were three cases there. Obviously it means they knew something they didn’t tell the rest of the world. Right, the rest of the world should have looked at what the dictatorship was doing, not what it said to the world.

The P4 lab in Wuhan, the only one in China operating at that level of danger and confinement, was set up by the French. Democracy is smarter. The Chinese dictatorship is mostly a giant colony of carnivorous, bat eating, pangolin snacking, lazy parrots. The Chinese were banned from the ISS, the International Space Station, because it was believed they would just parrot all they saw inside, and then undermine. A thermonuclear dictatorship is an immense danger. Arguably, China is more of a dictatorship than Russia.

It is said, by people living there, that Wuhan is only 20-30% back. Not 70% as propaganda has it. We will beat this virus through advanced tech and science, as revealed by democracy. The tin pot dictator in China, a larger version of the one in North Korea, wants to pass for valuable, but he is just a thief, who stole billions, and knows just enough goons to impose his small-man will…

Branson, Harvard, Xi (and their little boy helpers, from Kenya or not…)… All these “moral persons” (that’s a juridic term), are deeply evil, they are poison to Democracy, thus intelligence, thus survival. Time to heap spite on them!

As Aristophanes said, enough of these small-man stories. Let’s get rid of them.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] After all, HARVARD UNIVERSITY WILL return $8.6 million it received from a coronavirus relief package that Congress passed last month after a public dispute with President Donald Trump and his administration.

The about-face came just hours after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called on lawmakers to ban “elite, wealthy institutions” from receiving funding from the federal coronavirus stimulus package.

Filthy rich Princeton, Stanford, and other leading plutocratic universities also returned Coronavirus employer paycheck funds right away, Trump announced on April 23… HOWEVER, I know filthy wealthy LAW FIRMS, who have grabbed what a chuckling multimillionaire partner told me was Coronavirus “free money“.

***

[2] The former Commander in Chief, Obama the Plutophile, Light of self-celebrating “Liberals”, learned how to kitesurf with tax-free, subsidies gulping plutocrat Richard Branson. The Obamas enjoyed their time off on Necker Island, the Virgin founder’s luxury island in the Caribbean, according to Branson’s blog… At last they could be what they always wanted to be… 

***

[3] Subsidy, influence peddling, corruption specialist Branson Branson pledged to inject $250m (£197m) into Virgin Group, his Obama seducing empire which stretches from planes and trains to health clubs and spaceships for billionaires, and which employs about 70,000 people. The pledge – of which $100m is thought to be earmarked for the airline – is not even 5% of his fortune. And he paid no taxes for 14 years to anyone! But as a foundation of his fun, to him and his ilk, is to make fun of us, by seeing how stupid we can get for his amusement and that of his species, what is there not to like? When one pays nurses $20 an hour, and kickballers, $10,000 an hour, one may as well pay Branson a few billions: after all those Obamas and their ilk got to be pretty expensive to entertain and keep happy….

 

Why Light And Gravitation Travel At The Same Speed, A Modern Reasoning

Why Rome failed is because Rome was obsessed by its own navel. Like Buddha (who also failed, at least in India, for the same reason!) Navel obsession has military consequences. Making big reasoning, striving for a grandiose view of the universe is not just what makes civilization worth defending, it’s also what enables to defend civilization.

Now it’s easy to see that gravitation goes at the speed of light: take a mass M, and the exact same antimatter mass, call it (-M). In practice say one elementary particle and its antimatter correspondent (electron, positon; nucleon, anti-nucleon). Before annihilating each other, they generate gravitation, G. After, light, L. If G, or L propagated at different speeds there would be shocks in the system, and energy conservation would be violated.

After annihilation, transforming the pair M, Anti M, into pure light, if the light energy L went faster than the gravitation energy G, it would catch up, creating a (energy violating) shock

Skeptics could object to this little reasoning of mine. They could point out at Quantum Physics, where violations of energy conservation are allowed, if short enough. Now, right, it’s not because something is allowed that it happens. However, the theory of Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) has proven that these violations DO happen: namely if one incorporates them in computations, one gets the correct results, otherwise, not so.  

However, the root of the Uncertainty Principle is the size of the waves relative to the mass of the object. With large masses, large M, the reasoning above holds, because uncertainty on the mass of M goes down, and the disruption of energy conservation becomes arbitrarily large…

In other news, Quantum Physics says: spacetime doesn’t exist. But many talk as if it does, parotting a prestigious parrot, Minkowski. Then they have problems with cats.

Patrice Ayme

Corochinavirus News: Oil Goes Negative, Countries’ Death Rates All Over The Place…

(Boosted a bit April 22 2020). For the first Time Ever the most deflationary shock, ever … Last contract for the month of May, when future becomes real delivery on 4/20/2020: the price of a barrel of oil FELL $55 (fifty-five) dollars today… Becoming -$37… Yes MINUS thirty-seven dollars: they pay you $37 if you take custody of a barrel of oil. UNPRECEDENTED. The poisonous stuff is being produced, but nobody wants it anymore [1]. They pay you to get rid of it… like the pollutant it is. 

How To Explain The Differing Death Rates Among Countries?

Milan, industrial capital of Italy, got infected stealthily, yet massively, thanks to the air bridge from Wuhan, the Corochina virus capital. While China cut all flights from Wuhan and Hubei, the air bridge Wuhan-Milan was not stopped. The virus then got into a pretty old population.

Oil Goes To Hell In A Handbasket, as deserved… Yes these are negative prices…

France, like the rest of Europe, didn’t stop the flights from China. The first cases and deaths were Chinese tourists in France. Also some Brits coming back from Asia, and a mass church of some Christian sect in Mulhouse.

Germany, and other Northern Europeans were infected mostly through a very young population of partying skiers in ski resorts (which were lockdowned too late). So, intrinsically, the population initially hit in Germany was COVID resistant. Germany also tested massively and early, differently from France, Great Britain. Germany is now developing its own antibody test (instead of purchasing dozens from… China, as the US FDA has allowed!)

Germany doesn’t count the nursing homes deaths as well as France does. A running recount by the UK government has shown the number of deaths first announced was 40% what the recount showed. So the death numbers are all over the map. Typically deaths at home are not counted (New York has typically 25 deaths at home a day… recently it has run around 150, six times more…)

In other news, the long term death rate was based on the Diamond Princess… where passengers got first class health care from Japanese hospitals, with maximum care on individual patients. Initially the death rate was reported to be no more than 1%… However two months later what we have from that ship is this: 712 cases, 7 in critical care (ventilation), 13 dead. So we get a morality and morbidity rate close to 3%… 

Otherwise measured, it seems the death care is arguably 21% for those catching the disease. Here are the official numbers 4/20/2020: 815,204 Cases which had an outcome: 645,019 (79%) Recovered / Discharged.

170,185 (21%) DEATHS.

Want more of the same? Countries are massively under-reporting.

As the NYT points out in “28,000 missing deaths: Tracking the true toll of the crisis.”

“In the last month, far more people died in these [ELEVEN] countries than in previous years, The New York Times found. The totals include deaths from Covid-19 and those from other causes, potentially including those who could not be treated as hospitals became overwhelmed.

These numbers contradict the notion that many people who have died from the virus might soon have died anyway. In Paris, more than twice the usual number of people have died each day, far more than at the peak of a bad flu season. In New York City, the number is four times the normal amount.”

So what next? Definitely, some individuals relapse, there are well-documented cases all around the world, such unfortunate souls seem to have virus “reservoirs” inside their bodies, and the antibody protection seems far from perfect…. Also the virus attacks the central nervous system in at least a third of the case, and many other organs (and that may cause death directly). It’s known that some viruses can shelter in place inside the central nervous system. Also, in the case of rabies, the immune system counterattack (cytokine storm) ravages the brain… And the same exact mechanism seems at work in some cases of COVID…

Some, many countries have either too much incompetence to count the death properly (say Ecuador), or are outright lying (China). How do we know China’s dictatorship lied? Simple: some cities like Chengdu (capital of Sichuan) were locked down completely, when they had literally 3 cases. All of Hubei was lockdowned, when there were less than 500 cases, worldwide, officially, and 17 deaths… So obviously the Chinese government knew something we didn’t.  

Now this virus has provided us with a demonstration why humanity is not compatible with dictatorship. So China should be encouraged, looking forward, to switch to democracy by being submitted to increasing economic diversification away from itself. For its own good. Like Apartheid South Africa. Apartheid in South Africa killed and oppressed South Africans, but didn’t threaten to kill dozens of millions of people of the world… as Xi’s dictatorship just did.

Patrice Ayme 

***

[1] The world has an estimated storage capacity for 6.8 billion barrels, and nearly 60 percent is filled. (That roughly means than the US production would fill it up in around 4 months…) World oil production needs to go down 30% to balance world demand.

Some of the oil glut is evident in Cushing, Okla., a critical storage hub where the oil that trades on the U.S. futures market is delivered. With a capacity to hold 80 million barrels of oil, Cushing has only 21 million barrels of free storage left, or less than two days of American production. As recently as February, Cushing was not even up to 50 percent. Experts say it will be filled to the brim in May.

Monday 20 April, Trump said the government was “looking to put as much as 75 million barrels” into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is used as a buffer during crises (it was created after the 1973-1974 oil embargo). He added he will go ask Congress about it… Some democrats said they will introduce legislation for the cost of putting the oil in the reserve… (At most half a million barrels a day can get in…)

But it gets better than that.

Shutting down oil wells and then restarting them when demand returns requires expensive manpower and equipment. Fields do not always recover their former production (production is a dynamic process, is oil is often actively pushed…). In addition, some oil companies have to keep pumping, even if they are losing money, in order to pay interest on their debts and keep on functioning (oil workers are fickle).

In late 2019, the US produced 13.3 million barrels of oil a day.

 

 

No Science, No Existence: Why Roman Tech And Science Was Parroted and Imported Too Much

Roman Republican ARMY equipment was PURCHASED in Celtic lands (swords, helmets, etc.). Talk about depending upon the enemy… When fighting allies of Carthage in Spain during the first Punic War (264-241 BCE), legions met, and then adopted the gladius Hispaniensis, the “Spanish sword”.  

Then in time for Second Punic War, the Roman gladius was made with the finest-quality steel then available in western Europe, the ferrum Noricum, from the Alpine kingdom of Noricum (roughly modern Austria).  The Roman conquest of Cisalpine Gaul in the period 220-180 BC exposed legionaries to the Celtic lorica hamata, or mail coat. It replaced the bronze cuirass they wore previously.

“Imperial Gallic” helmets were made of fine steel, forged in one piece. They were the products of Celtic craftsmen in Gaul. Featuring a pair of distinctive embossed eyebrows reinforcements in different metals on the forehead region, they were carefully made and elaborately decorated. “Imperial Italic” helmets  were weaker, not made of steel. They lacked the eyebrows and were roughly made, with chisel metal work appearing, by less-skilled copycats in Italy and elsewhere in the Empire.

The Celts had better metallurgy… and this would keep on being true all the way until Frankish steel confronted the three Muslim massive invasions of 721 CE (Toulouse) to 748 CE (Narbonne). To pursue the Gallic tradition, the “100 years war” with the Anglo-Norman-Angevin monarchy finished badly for the English when two engineers, the Bureau brothers, invented field guns.. No doubt another metallurgical exploit. 

Notice also that Spain had also been taken over by the Celts. So the Spanish glavius, which became the main weapon of the Roman legions, was also a Celtic weapon.

The Romans were excellent engineers. And they invented at least one remarkable product: Roman concrete. It mixed in volcanic material from south of Rome. Modern scientists have been trying to reproduce it, as it solidifies at low temperatures and produces much less CO2 than 20 C cement. To this day, the largest non metallically reinforced concrete building in the world is the Parthenon in Rome. 

Pantheon, Rome: Still the largest non reinforced concrete building in the world, 19 centuries later…

However, in other mental matters of the highest standing, the Romans were superb at DUPLICATING the technologies and ways of others, and making technological improvements: they copied admirably Carthage military ship tech. 

But mostly the Romans copied others’ tech (it’s no accident that the Gregian fire, as its name indicates, was a Greek invention). Copying worked well, until the Romans terminated the Greek city-states socio-economy and freedom, thus creativity and motivation (Second and First Century BCE). Then the Romans found themselves unable to copy anybody but themselves. Monkeys without masters to inspire them, soon to the jungle returned. Seriously: there is no Roman science (Alexandria was a Greek city). 

This came back to bite them: Barbarians caught up in military technology. There was a general military tech stagnation: actually even the Germans got caught up in tech by the Mongols. The Huns invaded the Germans (in what is now Ukraine, Russia), because they had slightly better composite bows… with arrows which could penetrate Roman armor. Yet, eight centuries later, when the Huns were back, after costly victories in Poland and Hungary, top Mongol generals remembered what had happened to their ancestors in France (a succession of defeats, the first one inside Aurelianium/Orleans, at the hand of Celts and Francks). They thought their weapons would not be good enough… and went back to Mongolia (under the pretext of the Khan’s election; the Golden Horde stayed to occupy Ukraine and Russia…)

So what went wrong with Rome? … Besides allying itself with the Huns (at some point; paradoxically, when Attila, king of the Huns, died, it reduced the pressure on the Germans, and Rome was unable to recover North Africa, seized by the Vandals…) There was something wrong with the Roman notion of what it meant to be noble and intelligent. Simply, Roman standards were not high enough, they were barking up the wrong tree. They barked up the tree of vaingloriousness, instead of the tree of knowledge. .

The Romans were expert rhetoricians. The Romans were long expert sociologists: they ended up with the world’s largest Democratic Republic (and basically the only one, as Hellenistic regimes were mostly authoritarian oligarchies, or oppressed by tyrants as Athens or the island of Rhodes were…)… The Roman Republic lasted five centuries greatly because it had been smartly engineered, with a number of wealth limits… When those failed, so did the Republic. 

What Romans didn’t have was philosophical and scientific ambition. The Bureau brother invented field guns… But that was generations after Buridan in Paris had overthrown Aristotelian physics… Jean Bureau led research efforts into a more potent powder that could fire projectiles at a much greater velocity, without mixing in the field. Innovations in casting created stronger barrels that were less likely to explode… Four centuries later, when the french Republic got attacked by the coalition of plutocracies known as Europe’s monarchies, the Polytechnique School would be created, precisely to improve the world’s best artillery (which defeated the invading Prussians at Valmy in 1792, not far from Paris).

Also the Franks had learned to forge (with force multiplying hydraulic hammers) massive steel, centuries prior. When the enormous Amiens cathedral started to slowly bulge, crushed by its own mass, a massive steel belt was devised to hold it together. The cathedral is still standing….

What was missing with the Romans was to desire the stars. This is also, perhaps why, when Caesar rolled the most ambitious military plan to insure the safety of the Republic (seize Iran, ram through the Caucasus, take Germany from behind)… He got assassinated by traitors who didn’t have the safety of the Republic foremost (although they pretended that this was their main motivation). 

As it turned out, the Parthians attacked Rome a couple of years after the assassination of Caesar, and Antonius, with around a small fraction of the Roman forces that Caesar would have had, was defeated in north-west Iran during the counter-attack, a few years after that. After that, it was pretty much downhill: the war with Iran would go another six centuries… Until those crafty desert Arabs (by opposition to more civilized Arabs, to the north…) won it….

The Republic needs to be defended, but it’s best defended by understanding. And understanding has no limits, no “limes”… This is what the dictators of China have all too often forgotten, as all dictators are wont to… And why China spent most of the last millennium occupied, or managed by foreign invaders, and their descendants…

Roman existence was not intellectual enough. This is why, ultimately the Roman state collapsed… A headless chicken can’t run out of trouble. 

The Franks, empowered by Roman Consular Imperium, were smarter (or at least elected kings and imperators Childeric and his son Consul Clovis were). The Franks first, concentrated on what was wrong with the Roman dominant ideology known as Roman Orthodox Catholicism. It turned out that Christianism was making children stupid, by outlawing secular education. That, in turn, became the greatest military advantage, and in no small measure why the Franks were able to conquer Europe, including the Eastern Europe which had eluded Rome. 

There is such a thing as the culture of innovation. The Romans had it in many ways, including engineering, under the Republic… But excluding science, philosophy and most other highest intellectual pursuits… Once the Principate ruled, innovation, and the debates which precede it, were increasingly focused on ever deeper and better fascism. The last time the People’s Assembly took a decision was in second part of the First Century…

Science is not just about the honor of the human spirit. 

No science no existence…

Patrice Ayme

Why The ROMAN STATE COLLAPSED (Part I; Plus Contemporary Analogy)